[8] In 1977, he was contracted as Coach and Assistant Conductor at the Pfalztheater in Kaiserslautern, Germany, where he made his conducting debut with the Tankred Dorst's and Peter Zadek's cabaret/review Kleiner Mann – Was nun?.
[9][10][11][12][13] In 1984, after seven years in Germany, he accepted an appointment as Resident Associate Conductor at the State Theatre in Pretoria, South Africa, where he made his opera conducting debut when he jumped in to replace italian maestro Anton Guadagno in Johannesburg performances of Manon Lescaut in 1985.
[14][15] From 1986 to 1991, he worked as Conductor and Chorus Master at the Cape Town Opera, making his conducting debut with Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro on February 15, 1986.
[16] During this time, he was also Music Director of the Philharmonia Choir of Cape Town, one of the oldest choral societies in the Southern Hemisphere, conducting Philharmonia's concerts with orchestra in Cape Town City Hall,[17] including annual Easter performances of Handel's Messiah,[18] Haydn's The Creation,[19] Mendelssohn's Elijah, and Handel's Judas Maccabaeus for Hanukkah and the international premiere of Martin Kalmanoff's The Joy of Prayer, both in 1989.
[24] During this time he worked closely with many great stage directors, including Franco Zeffirelli (Carmen 1996; La traviata 1999) and Otto Schenk (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg 1993; Don Pasquale 2006) During the 1996 season, and in subsequent seasons, under Hughes’ direction, the Met Chorus appeared in concert in Carnegie Hall with Levine and the Met Orchestra in Berlioz La damnation de Faust, Verdi Requiem, Schoenberg Gurre-Lieder, Haydn The Creation, and Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms.
As a student of Russian language and culture, Hughes also closely collaborated with Valery Gergiev during the time of the Met's association with the Kirov Opera in St. Petersburg in productions of Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame, Eugene Onegin, and Mazeppa; Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District; and Prokofiev's War and Peace.
In 2012, he was appointed Artistic Director of the Thomasville Music and Drama Troupe in his home town in Georgia, which appeared in concert at the White House in Washington on December 22, 2012.