John Wilson

Wilson was born in Gateshead, Tyne and 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 studied composition and conducting at the Royal College of Music, and during this time won the Tagore Gold Medal for outstanding academic excellence.

In addition to conducting a number of British-based orchestras, 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.[1] Many of the original film scores were destroyed by MGM in 1969, and left only the short scores or piano scores, from 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!” [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 a BBC Proms concert of British film music, followed in 2009 by a celebration of MGM Musicals, and made a further appearance in the 2010 Proms celebrating Rodgers and 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 made another two performances at the BBC Proms. The first performance 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] Following on from his education at the Royal College of Music, he is now a member of staff and fellow who conducts and performs to students and members of the public within the conservatoire.[6] He was recently appointed a patron of The British Art Music Series [7] along with James MacMillan and Libby Purves. Wilson made his operatic debut conducting a series of performances of Ruddigore for Opera North in early 2010.[8] In September 2013 he was named Principal Conductor Designate of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra[9] and officially took over the position on 1 January 2014.