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John Wilson (born 1972) is a British conductor, arranger and musicologist, who conducts orchestras and operas, as well as big band jazz. He is the artistic director of Sinfonia of London.
Wilson was born in Gateshead, Tyne & Wear. He attended Breckenbeds Junior High School in Low Fell, then Heathfield Senior High School in Gateshead (now closed). In the late 1980s he studied music at A-level at Newcastle College, where he conducted a variety of ensembles including a 96-piece orchestra and choir for a concert version of West Side Story. He wrote and directed his own pantomime during this period and he also conducted for many local amateur dramatic societies. Later he attended the Royal College of Music, first as a percussionist, and later studying composition and conducting.[1] During this time he won the institution's Tagore Gold Medal for outstanding academic excellence.[2]
In 2004 Wilson was appointed the music director for the Hollywood feature film Beyond the Sea, a biopic of the life of Bobby Darin starring Kevin Spacey. In 2007 he conducted the BBC Concert Orchestra in a BBC Proms concert of British film music, followed in 2009 by conducting his own orchestra (the John Wilson Orchestra) in their Proms debut, a celebration of MGM Musicals, and made a further appearance in the 2010 Proms celebrating Rodgers & Hammerstein.[3] He made a further Proms appearance in the 2011 season, entitled "Hooray for Hollywood", featuring his orchestra with the Maida Vale Singers and soloists. In 2012 he and his orchestra gave another two performances at the BBC Proms. The first was a complete reconstruction of My Fair Lady which was broadcast on radio,[4] the second was a tribute to the composers and arrangers of "The Broadway Sound" shown on BBC Two.[5] The John Wilson Orchestra appeared in every Proms season from 2009 to 2019, with a semi-staged version of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! being the 2017 Prom.[6]
In recent years, Wilson has focused on conducting orchestras and operas, beginning the latter with a series of performances of Ruddigore for Opera North in early 2010.[7] He has conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, notably for the UK premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage's Håkan, a concerto for trumpet and orchestra.[8] He has also conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Glyndebourne Touring Opera, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, CBSO, and regularly conducts BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. In July 2017, he made his debut with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, performing a programme of works by Leonard Bernstein[9] and appeared at the Proms conducting the BBCSSO in his role of Associate Guest Conductor.[10]
He held the position of Principal Conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra[11] from 1 January 2014, until December 2016.[12] Wilson took up the position of Associate Guest Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in September 2016.[13]
Wilson has made numerous recordings, both with his own orchestra and as guest conductor, including an ongoing series of discs of music by Aaron Copland,[14] with the BBC Philharmonic, for Chandos Records.[15]
In 2018, John Wilson reformed the Sinfonia of London to undertake a series of recordings, beginning with a recording of Korngold's Symphony in F Sharp for Chandos Records.[16]
He is a patron of The British Art Music Series[17] along with James MacMillan and Libby Purves.
Wilson is also an arranger and orchestrator and has produced a number of orchestrations for film, radio and television. In 2000 he orchestrated Sir Richard Rodney Bennett's incidental music for a BBC production of Gormenghast. This scoring won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Film Score. Wilson orchestrated and conducted Howard Goodall's score for the 2002 BBC film The Gathering Storm about the life of Winston Churchill.
Wilson's interest in historical film scores has led to his restoring a number of classic film scores and he is currently reconstructing the orchestrations of all the major MGM musicals, especially those by Conrad Salinger.[18] Many of the original film scores were destroyed by MGM in 1969, and left only the short scores or piano scores, which Wilson used as a guide when reconstructing. He described in an interview that "transcribing music from the soundtrack is an incredibly laborious process and sometimes it's very, very slow going. The cyclone sequence from The Wizard of Oz took forever. I remember spending a whole Sunday doing three or four seconds' worth of music, so complex is that scene, with notes flying all over the page!"[19]
