Richard balcombe conductor biography sample

Film music concerts are very rare, and film music concerts in my home city of Brighton are even rarer, this year however we have been treated on the South Coast to a pair of excellent performances at the cities famed Dome Concert hall, the first being back in the summer with the Bournemouth Symphony orchestra who performed a great evening of music from sci fi movies and movies about superheroes. Then this Sunday the 4th of December it got better as the BRIGHTON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA took to the stage to perform a varied and rich programme of music from British movies. THE BEST OF BRITISH FILM SCORES as it was billed and promoted was in fact just that, it included a line up which I think you will agree is the cream of the crop when it comes to British movie music. However, saying that after this concert I am hoping the Brighton Philharmonic might consider dipping their toes into the deep and thriving waters of British film music both old and contemporary. What I loved about this concert was that the content was not in any way predictable, in fact there were several items in the programme that I was surprised at. The conductor for this afternoon performance was Richard Balcombe, he is a conductor who has worked in opera, west end shows and is also well known as an arranger and orchestrator for numerous popular artists such as Sir Cliff Richard, Will Young, Lesley Garrett, Michael Ball, Ronan Keating and many more. He also conceived, arranged, and orchestrated WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW the music of Burt Bacharach and has conducted for Jose Carreras, Roberto Alagna, Bryn Terfel and Angela Gheorgiu on BBC TV. He has collaborated with orchestras all over the world, including, THE GOTHENBURG SYMPHONY, ORCHESTRE NATIONAL DE LILLE, PRAGUE CHAMBER ORCHESTRA and ACCADEMIA NAZIONALE DI SANTA CECILIA. The orchestra has been established at the DOME since 1928 which is when they also became the fully orchestral symphonic players. They initially however started out as the Sy

I listened to the 60th anniversary edition of FNIMN, and felt great pride in my own involvement over the years in this great radio institution, although not quite for all 60 years - (I first appeared as a member of the Stephen Hill Choir in 1983) - but for at least half its life, and alarmingly for more than half of mine!

It was a nerve wracking first rehearsal at Golders Green Empire.  My sister, opera singer Sue Bickley, (and already a choir member), had emphasised the importance of having a pencil to mark up the music. With said pencil behind my ear, I felt quite the professional but last minute rehearsal nerves demanded one final visit to the loo, and in slow motion, it fell from its lofty perch, into the loo and my heart sank as speedily as the pencil.

However, I rescued the catastrophe - you needn't concern yourself with the details, and here I am some 30 years on, at another FNIMN rehearsal, this time at Watford Coliseum in preparation for a live broadcast on October 4th at the Mermaid Theatre - armed with not one, but two pencils!

This edition of FNIMN is somewhat different from the norm in as much as conductor Richard Balcombe and I have been asked to present one of our own self-produced concert programmes, a programme already performed by various UK orchestras. Familiarity with the music will be a welcome bonus, but it will still be nerve wracking, as all live editions inevitably are - any slip-ups forever available on iPlayer for days to come!

As ever, to listen to the BBC Concert Orchestra play anything is a treat, but to hear them play our Burt Bacharach programme is sure to be thrilling.

And indeed it was!  The rehearsal now over, we will reconvene on the day of the concert.  We four singers provide our own backing vocals and to sing as a group is a joy.  Abbie, Mary and Sarah are enormous fun to work alongside and a delight to listen to. Incidentally, I was  talking to Mary today, and we think it highly likely she was alre

As part of the Southbank Centre’s year-long retrospective festival The Rest Is Noise, the BBC Concert Orchestra assembled on Saturday 30 November 2013 in the Queen Elizabeth Hall to perform 19 eighties : the rhythm of a decade. The program boasted a sundry of diverse compositions, including a highly anticipated rendition of John Tavener’s The Lamb as well as Steve Martland’s Re-Mix. The evening was set to focus primarily on a side of the eighties that is perhaps less well remembered in the press and even in the public consciousness, a side that had forgotten the pop culture trivialities of shoulder pads, Bros and Teddy Ruxpin. With a 76-piece orchestra and the great conductor Richard Balcombe at the helm, there was a delightful feeling of expectation – rows of eager, beaming faces – as presenter Paul Morley approached the stage.

The event was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and so the audience had all been shuffled to their seats rather promptly before the show began. Although the venue was by no means full, we were instructed to applaud with gusto for the sake of the aforementioned radio program. This was not going to be a problem, as the opening number, Andrew Poppy’s 32 Frames for Orchestra made for a bounding introduction. It was attention grabbing in a way that cast aside all the cliched reference points one associates with the eighties as a consequence of the distribution channels that took off during that era. Once Poppy’s spellbinding number came to a close, it was a real treat to see him appear onstage to play piano on Almost the Same Shame. On its world premiere, the arrangement saw Poppy as a daring and agile comp

The composer - Lotta Wennakoski