Meurig Bowen is a British arts administrator who works mainly in festival and orchestral programming. Since 2020 he has been Chief Executive and Artistic Director of the Britten Sinfonia.
He is the younger son of Welsh tenor Kenneth Bowen (1932–2018)[1] and brother of Hereford Cathedral Director of Music Geraint Bowen.[2]
Bowen was educated at William Ellis School, London, and King's College, Cambridge, where he was a choral scholar (1985–88). After graduating he spent six years at a London artist management company, where he was administrator of the Hilliard Ensemble. He then spent six years as artistic administrator of the Australian Chamber Orchestra in Sydney. He returned to the UK as director of the Lichfield Festival from 2002,[3][4] and subsequently head of programming at the Aldeburgh Festival, before in 2007 becoming Artistic Director of the Cheltenham Music Festival, succeeding Martyn Brabbins;[5][6] he remained there until 2017. In December 2017 he became Head of Artistic Planning at the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales.[7]
In 2017, Quarto Books/Wide Eyed Editions published The School of Music, a children's book they commissioned him to co-wrote with his wife Rachel, illustrated by Daniel Frost.[8][9] The English language edition was followed in 2018 by translations in Brazil, Bulgaria, China, France, Korea and Russia. In 2020, Quarto pulped all available copies globally, due to the book's associated website being hacked by extortionists.
In August 2020, Bowen was appointed as Chief Executive and Artistic Director of the Britten Sinfonia, a chamber orchestra based in Cambridge,[10] where he remains as of 2023.[11]
At times, Bowen has been active as a music journalist and commentator,[12] writing for the national press[13] and for CD liner notes, notably on the Hyperion label.[14][15]
Bowen’s two-hander for actor and pianist, Erik Satie: Memoirs of a Pear-Shaped Life, was premiered at the 2015 Cheltenham Music Festival,[16] and has since been performed at the Presteigne and Canterbury Festivals, St George's Bristol, in Oxford and New York.
Ex Cathedra is a leading British choir and early music ensemble based in Birmingham in the West Midlands, England. It performs choral music spanning the 15th to 21st centuries, and regularly commissions new works.
Joanna Clare MacGregor is a British concert pianist, conductor, composer, and festival curator. She is Head of Piano at the Royal Academy of Music and a professor of the University of London. She was artistic director of the International Summer School & Festival at Dartington Hall from 2015 to 2019.
City of London Sinfonia (CLS) is an English chamber orchestra based in London. CLS is orchestra-in-residence at Opera Holland Park since 2004 and holds a residency at St Paul's Cathedral. CLS also performs regularly across the city of London in venues from East London clubs to traditional Central London concert halls. It is a registered charity under English law. CLS performs chamber orchestra and ensemble repertoire from the Baroque period to the present day, and has a programming focus on the human voice.
Colin Matthews, OBE is an English composer of contemporary classical music. Noted for his large-scale orchestral compositions, Matthews is also a prolific arranger of other composer's music, including works by Berlioz, Britten, Dowland, Mahler, Purcell and Schubert. Other arrangements include orchestrations of all Debussy's 24 Préludes, both books of Debussy's Images, and two movements—Oiseaux tristes and La vallée des cloches—from Ravel's Miroirs. Having received a doctorate from University of Sussex on the works of Mahler, from 1964–1975 Matthews worked with his brother David Matthews and musicologist Deryck Cooke on completing a performance version of Mahler's Tenth Symphony.
Richard Sidney Hickox was an English conductor of choral, orchestral and operatic music.
Geraint Bowen is a British conductor and organist. He is Organist and Director of Music at Hereford Cathedral.
Royal Northern Sinfonia is a British chamber orchestra, founded in Newcastle upon Tyne and currently based in Gateshead. For the first 46 years of its history the orchestra gave most of its concerts at the Newcastle City Hall. It also gave monthly concerts in Middlesbrough town hall and at Stockton & Billingham Technical College in Billingham. Since 2004 the orchestra has been resident at Sage Gateshead. In June 2013 Queen Elizabeth II bestowed the title 'Royal' on the orchestra, formally naming it Royal Northern Sinfonia.
Martyn Charles Brabbins is a British conductor. He was the music director of the English National Opera from 2016 until his resignation in 2023.
The Lichfield Festival is an annual multi-art-form festival held in Lichfield, Staffordshire, England. Performances include drama, dance, film, literature, visual arts, jazz, folk, classical and world music. Performances take place principally in the medieval Lichfield Cathedral and the 21st century Lichfield Garrick theatre, alongside non-traditional venues across the County. The Festival also incorporates free community events such as the Festival Market and the Festival Fireworks.
John Woolrich is an English composer.
Britten Sinfonia is a chamber orchestra ensemble based in Cambridge, UK. It was created in 1992, following an initiative from Eastern Arts and a number of key figures including Nicholas Cleobury, who recognised the need for an orchestra in the East of England. It is a flexible ensemble composed of chamber musicians in Europe. The players are freelance musicians who are employed on a project-by-project basis and the ensemble performs around 70 concerts per year and works with hundreds of people in the communities where the orchestra is resident.
The Philharmonia Chorus is an independent self-governing symphony chorus based in London, UK. Since its foundation in 1957 the Chorus has given over 900 concerts and made over 100 recordings. The Chorus Master is Gavin Carr.
Roger William Wright CBE is an English arts administrator. He is currently the Chief Executive of Britten Pears Arts.
Andrew Keith Wailes is an Australian conductor and music director. Winner of the Australasian International Choral Conducting Competition in Brisbane in 1999, he is the current artistic director and Chief Conductor of the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra, Principal Conductor of the Melbourne University Choral Society, and music director and Conductor of the Box Hill Chorale. From 1999 to 2020 he served as artistic director of The Australian Children's Choir, and for a decade was Director of the Australian Catholic University Melbourne Campus Choir. He is a former president of the Australian Intervarsity Choral Societies Association, and is a former Artistic Administrator and artistic director of The Chamber Strings of Melbourne.
Gavin Carr is a British conductor and baritone working with major choruses in the UK and appearing in opera and concert in the UK and around the globe.
Ben Parry is a British musician, composer, conductor, singer, arranger and producer. He is the Director of London Voices and was formally Artistic Director of the National Youth Choir.
Joseph Phibbs is an English composer of orchestral, choral and chamber music. He has also composed for theatre, both in the UK and Japan. Since 1998 he has written regularly to commissions for Festivals, for private sponsors, and for the BBC, which has broadcast premieres of his orchestral and chamber works from the Proms and elsewhere. His works have been given premieres in Europe, the United States and the Far East, and he has received prestigious awards, including most recently a British Composer Award, and a Library of Congress Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation Award. Many of his works have been premiered by leading international musicians, including Dame Evelyn Glennie, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leonard Slatkin, Sakari Oramo, Vasily Petrenko, Gianandrea Noseda, and the Belcea Quartet.
Adam Gatehouse is an English conductor, radio producer and editor, and classical music administrator. He was the main conductor of the Ballet Rambert and the Dutch National Ballet before working for BBC Radio 3 (1991–2013), where he became editor of live music, and founded the New Generation Artists scheme and the Wigmore Hall lunchtime concert series. He has been artistic director of the Leeds International Piano Competition since 2015.
This is a summary of the year 2018 in British music.
Kenneth Bowen was a Welsh tenor who was Head of Vocal Studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
