David Jones was a chorister and eventually assistant organist at St Columb's cathedral in Derry before coming to Trinity in 1978. He graduated with an honours degree in music during which time he conducted the Singers, winning prizes at the Cork lnternational Choral Festival, and first prize in the Culwick Cup for madrigal singing at the Dublin Feis Ceoil. He was appointed conductor of the Tallaght Choral Society in September 1982 and joined forces with the Dublin Baroque Players in March 1983 for a performance of Haydn's Nelson Mass and Vivaldi's Gloria, as well as Purcell's Dido and Aeneas in Trinity earlier in the year. During the summers of 1982 and 1983 while studying under Hungarian born conductor, Janos Furst, he conducted the New Irish Chamber Orchestra. Having conducted the RTÉ Concert Orchestra in recordings for 'Invitation to Music' and reaching the semi-final in an International Competition for Young Conductors in Besançon, France, he was awarded a scholarship to study conducting with Franco Ferrara in Siena in 1984. Having brought the TCS to the National Concert Hall for the first time in March 1985, performing the St John Passion for Bach's tercentenary, David left Ireland that summer for a conducting fellowship at Manchester's Royal Northern College of Music. He joined Scottish Opera in November 1993 and has been chorus master of the Edinburgh International Festival Chorus from 1994.

David has also studied under Seiji Ozawa and Leonard Bernstein at the Tanglewood Music Center. As well as Scottish Opera, he has also conducted for Opera Zuid in the Netherlands, the Wexford Opera Festival, Welsh National Opera and Opera Ireland, where he conducted the Irish première of Mark Anthony Turnage's The Silver Tassie. He was highly acclaimed for his Edinburgh Festival debut in 1996 conducting the world première of Kurtág's Songs of Despair and Sorrow which the Observer described as 'immensely difficult to perform, but surely also immensely rewarding and David Jones conducted two magnificent performances', and repeated the performance in Paris, Edinburgh and Salzburg with the Edinburgh Festival Singers, and in London with the BBC Singers.

Orchestras which David has worked with include the Ulster and BBC Philharmonic (with whom he recorded for BBC Radio 3), the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and Chorus, Manchester Camerata, the Hanover Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Scottish Symphony and Chamber Orchestra, and Northern Sinfonia. Recently he has worked with the Wuppertal Symphony and the orchestra of Opera de Nancy and the Berlin Radio Choir. Future engagements are with the Athens Symphony orchestra, Opera Ireland, Lyric Opera Dublin and Welsh National Opera.

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