Stephen William Barlow (born 30 June 1954) is an English conductor, principally of opera. He was Artistic Director of the Buxton Festival from 2012 to 2018.
Barlow was a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral before studying at King's School, Canterbury, then moving to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was an Organ Scholar. In 1986 he married the actress Joanna Lumley, with whom he lives in London. [1]
He composed the opera King, the story of Thomas Becket and Henry II of England, which had its world premiere in Canterbury Cathedral in April 2006.[ citation needed ] He has worked with the opera company Helios Collective on several projects. He composed a piece for Salon Russe at the National Gallery in 2016 and spoke as part of their Formations Masterclass series in 2017. [2]
He was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Music (D.Mus) for outstanding contributions to the arts by the University of Chester on 15 March 2019. [3]
In 2019 he appeared on Laura-Jane Foley's podcast 'My Favourite Work of Art' and chose F.L Griggs' 'The Almonry' as his chosen work of art. [4]
Barlow's wife Joanna Lumley has said that the couple live independent lives and when they are away from each other for work they do not telephone each other. [5]
The War Requiem, Op. 66, is a large-scale setting of the Requiem composed by Benjamin Britten mostly in 1961 and completed in January 1962. The War Requiem was performed for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, which was built after the original fourteenth-century structure was destroyed in a World War II bombing raid. The traditional Latin texts are interspersed, in telling juxtaposition, with extra-liturgical poems by Wilfred Owen, written during World War I.
Dame Joanna Lamond Lumley is a British actress, presenter, former model, author, television producer, and activist. She has won two BAFTA TV Awards for her role as Patsy Stone in the BBC sitcom Absolutely Fabulous (1992–2012), and was nominated for the 2011 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for the Broadway revival of La Bête. In 2013, she received the Special Recognition Award at the National Television Awards, and in 2017 she was honoured with the BAFTA Fellowship award.
George Sainton Kaye Butterworth, MC was an English composer who was best known for the orchestral idyll The Banks of Green Willow and his song settings of A. E. Housman's poems from A Shropshire Lad.
Roy Galbraith Henderson CBE was a British baritone singer, conductor and teacher.
Patrick Hawes is a British composer, conductor, organist and pianist.
Eleanor Steber was an American operatic soprano. Steber is noted as one of the first major opera stars to have achieved the highest success with training and a career based in the United States.
Gurre-Lieder is a tripartite oratorio followed by a melodramatic epilogue for five vocal soloists, narrator, three choruses, and grand orchestra. The work, which is based on an early song cycle for soprano, tenor and piano, was composed by the then-Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg from 1900 to 1903. Following a break, he resumed orchestration in 1910 and completed it in November of 1911. It sets to music the poem cycle Gurresange by the Danish novelist Jens Peter Jacobsen.
Patrick Arthur Sheldon Hadley was a British composer.
Alfred Giovanni Roncalli Boe is an English actor and singer who performs primarily in musical theatre.
Charles Wilfred Leslie Orr, generally known as C. W. Orr, was an English composer. He is particularly noted for his songs, though his output was small. He wrote only 35 songs in 82 years, 24 of them setting words by A. E. Housman.
Sea Drift is among the larger-scale musical works by the composer Frederick Delius. Completed in 1903–04 and first performed in 1906, it is a setting for baritone, chorus and orchestra of words by Walt Whitman.
Paul Mealor CLJ is a Welsh composer. A large proportion of his output is for chorus, both a cappella and accompanied. He came to wider notice when his motet Ubi Caritas et Amor was performed at the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton in 2011. He later composed the song "Wherever You Are", which became the 2011 Christmas number one in the UK Singles Chart. He has also composed two operas, four symphonies, concerti and chamber music.
Ronald Geoffrey Corp, is a composer, conductor and Anglican priest. He is founder and artistic director of the New London Orchestra (NLO) and the New London Children's Choir. Corp is musical director of the London Chorus, a position he took up in 1994, and is also musical director of the Highgate Choral Society.
Francis Charles Chacksfield was an English pianist, organist, composer, arranger, and conductor of popular light orchestral easy listening music, who had great success in Britain and internationally in the 1950s and early 1960s.
John Noble was an English baritone. He was Ralph Vaughan Williams's favourite in the title role of the composer's opera The Pilgrim's Progress.
Charlotte Bray is a British composer. She was championed by the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, London Sinfonietta and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, BBC Symphony Orchestra. Her music has been performed by many notable conductors such as: Sir Mark Elder, Oliver Knussen, Daniel Harding, and Jac van Steen.
The Requiem by Frederick Delius was written between 1913 and 1916, and first performed in 1922. It is set for soprano, baritone, double chorus and orchestra, and is dedicated "To the memory of all young artists fallen in the war". The Requiem is Delius's least-known major work, not being recorded until 1968 and having received only seven performances worldwide by 1980.
Songs of Sunset is a work by Frederick Delius, written in 1906–07, and scored for mezzo-soprano and baritone soli, SATB chorus and large orchestra. The words are by Ernest Dowson.
Julian Philips is a British composer. Philips' works have been performed at major music festivals, including The Proms, Tanglewood, Three Choirs Festival, at the Wigmore Hall, South Bank Centre and Berlin Philharmonic Chamber Music Hall and by international artists such as Gerald Finley, Dawn Upshaw, Sir Thomas Allen, the Vertavo String Quartet, the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra, the BBC orchestras and the Aurora Orchestra.