Born in Chester-le-Street, County Durham, England, he studied conducting, piano and orchestration at University of Huddersfield and graduated with first-class honours, as well as gaining the Kruczynski Prize for Piano and the Davidson Prize for Distinction Brought to the Institution. In 2019 he was conferred with an Honorary Doctorate from the University, for distinguished services to music.
In 2019 he was nominated for the inaugural Critics' Circle National Dance Award for Outstanding Creative Contribution, and won it the following year.
After many years as a guest conductor, in June 2008 he was appointed Music Director of English National Ballet, becoming Principal Conductor in 2010. He has conducted the company on both national and international tours, and has also contributed orchestrations to the company for their productions of Raymonda (Glazunov) Akram Khan's Giselle (Vincenzo Lamagna after Adam), Le Corsaire (Adam et al.), Men Y Men (Rachmaninoff), No Man's Land (Liszt), and the ENB2 productions of Angelina Ballerina's Big Audition, Angelina's Star Performance and the My First Ballet series, alongside many classic pas de deuxs for galas and competitions. In 2016 Sutherland orchestrated Vincenzo Lamagna's score for the Olivier Award-winning Akram Khan's Giselle for the company, and in 2018 he worked with ballet musicologist Lars Payne on reconstructing the complete original score of La Bayadere for the Berliner Staatsballet production by Alexei Ratmansky.
He has played a part in the revival of British Light Music chiefly through several popular series of discs, although he has recorded works as wide-ranging as Elgar's Dream of Gerontius, two chart-topping albums featuring scores from the Carry On films, and the single release of the Radio 4 UK Theme. From 2009 to 2018 he was Chairman of the Light Music Society, taking over from the late Ernest Tomlinson MBE, and also being responsible for Library of Light Orchestral Music, an important archive offering over 50,000 sets of light music for sale or rental to the public, in order to actively promote the performance of light music all over the world.
In addition to his work as a conductor, Gavin Sutherland works as a composer/arranger. He regularly supplies arrangements and orchestrations performed by all of the major BBC orchestras, the Australian Philharmonic, New Zealand Symphony, Philharmonia, Royal Scottish National, London Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony, Royal Opera House, Royal Northern Sinfonia and Hallé Orchestras amongst others, and his new arrangement of Giselle for the Norwegian National Ballet was revived by Milwaukee Ballet in 2004 and 2014, and staged by Estonian National Ballet in 2024. Other notable compositions include a musical, Little Women, which premiered in London in summer 2000 and received two West End revivals, a clarinet concerto, several chamber works and a one-act ballet, Revolting Rhymes.
Other
As a pianist Sutherland performs regularly as a concerto soloist, often directing from the keyboard, and appears as a recitalist, accompanist and chamber musician. He has recently released three live recordings of improvisations and compositions, Piano Pastimes. Most recently he provided the arrangements and conducted over a dozen sell-out UK tours for Raymond Gubbay. His work also features the reconstructions of works whose materials have been lost or destroyed, encompassing TV and film scores to classical ballet and symphonic orchestral works. As a speaker and broadcaster he has frequently spoken on BBC Radio and Television, and is renowned as an expert on ballet music, British Light Music and the music of British Television.
In April 2021 Sutherland compiled videos recorded at home by musicians of the ENB Philharmonic into several "Orchestra at Home" videos, the first in the UK during the early days of the COVID19 pandemic. He also arranged and performed concerts and gave talks both for the company's Dance for Parkinsons work and for a large collection of UK care homes.
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