David Seaman (OH 1961) Died 19th May 2018 (OH just made aware of this)
David Seaman died on the 19th May 2018 in Cardiff, which had been his home since the 1980s. Born in Hendon during the Second World War, his family moved to Mill Hill soon afterwards, where they lived for the next 20 years or so. David played the piano from a very early age, rattled through his graded examinations and then attended the Royal Academy of Music in his early teens. He attended Haberdashers’ Aske’s School Hampstead before going to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge to study Music, obtaining both Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Music degrees. Whilst at Cambridge, David won a prize for his arrangement of the Coventry Carol, which was then performed by the choir of King’s College in the Chapel. After Cambridge David studied conducting at the Guildhall School of Music in London. He trained as a repetiteur at the London Opera Centre and toured the UK with Opera for All. Applying for positions in the UK he was told he was too inexperienced, so David applied for and was awarded a scholarship to study conducting in Hamburg. This set him up for the next 12 or so years, leading to positions as a repetiteur at Deutsche Oper Am Rhein in Düsseldorf, as 2nd Kapellmeister for Städtische Buhnen in Nürnberg and 1st Kapellmeister for Landestheatre in Coburg. In 1974, during his time in Nürnberg, he co-founded Pocket Opera Company (POC), Germany’s oldest independent
opera company, which presented alternative full-length productions of operas, initially using David's own reduced orchestrations and then branching out as it became established. David continued to work as Musical Director of POC until 2003, adding to his library of arrangements which were toured extensively, both in Europe and throughout the world. The company still prospers to this day. David and his wife Christine, who met in Germany where she was a ballet dancer, decided to return to the UK when the eldest of their three children reached school age. With 12 years of work in Germany behind him, David now found he was too experienced for the positions he sought in the UK. However, he was offered a role at Welsh National Opera (WNO) as Conductor and Assistant Chorusmaster and the family moved to Cardiff in the mid1980s. Following from his success with POC, he conducted his version of Hansel and Gretel for WNO as the first of their circuit tours, which took opera to chamber theatres across Wales and the South West of England. The huge success of the first tour led to WNO commissioning David to arrange and conduct three more operas - Don Pasquale, Macbeth and 41