Stephen Stubbs, born 1951 in Seattle, has been engaged in music-making since early childhood. Parallel interests in new and pre-romantic music led him to take a degree in composition at university and to study the lute and harpsichord. Further years of study in Holland and England preceded his professional debut as lutenist at the Wigmore Hall, London in 1976. Since 1980 he has lived in North Germany where he is the professor for lute and performance practices at the Hochschule für Künste, Bremen.
With his direction of Stefano Landi's La Morte d'Orfeo at the 1987 Bruges festival, he began his career as opera director and simultaneously founded the ensemble Tragicomedia which has since recorded over 20 CDs and completed tours of Europe, North America and Japan. In 1996 he created the ensemble Teatro Lirico with the release of their first CD Love and Death in Venice. Further recordings of the ensemble include Italian 'Cello Concerti with soloist Lucie Swarts and a live recording of Antonio Sartorio's Orfeo of 1672 for Vanguard Classics was awarded the Cini Prize for best opera recording of 1999.
Stubbs has been invited to direct opera productions in most European countries, the US, Canada and Scandinavia. Most recently he directed Monteverdi’s Poppea in Vancouver, Mattheson’s Boris Goudenow in Boston, Gluck's Orfeo in Bilbao, and Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Murcia .
His solo lute recordings include the music of J.S. Bach, S.L. Weiss, David Kellner, Jaques St. Luc, Gaultier, Gallot and Logi. A recording of Bach's Luteworks was released in 2003 on the ATMA label where he also appears as the conductor of the Monteverdi Vespers with Tragicomedia and Handel Love Duets with Ensemble Arion. With baroque harpist Maxine Eilander he also recorded Sonate al Pizzico for ATMA in 2004. In 2006, new Teatro Lirico recordings will appear on the ECM label including Folia featuring improvisations on baroque chord patterns and new compositions by Stubbs for the baroque guitar.
In 2003 he was named permanent artistic co-director of the Boston Music Festival . He and artistic co-director Paul O'Dette have produced and directed a series of baroque operas at the Festival beginning in 1997 with Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo up to the production of the newly rediscovered Boris Goudenow of Johann Mattheson in 2005. The first recording of such a production was also released in 2005. This world premiere recording of Conradi’s Ariadne has been greeted with worldwide enthusiasm in the musical press.
To cultivate the singers and players of the next generation he founded an early opera course at the Hochschule in Bremen. In 2005 the eighth annual meeting of this intensive week-long workshop called the “Accademia d'Amore” was presented for the first time in Seattle. In 2006 he will move to Seattle where he has established a new graduate school for young singers and players of baroque music called the Seattle Academy of Baroque Opera.