Martyn Brabbins
For more than thirty years, conductor Martyn Brabbins has been at the forefront of British music in a career that has taken him from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Flemish Philharmonic to the Kirov, La Scala and his current position as music director at English National Opera.
Martyn, who was born in Leicester, studied composition in London and conducting with Ilya Musin in Leningrad, subsequently winning first prize at the 1988 Leeds Conductors’ Competition, which launched his international career.
An inspirational force in British music, he has enjoyed a busy opera career with positions at the Kirov and more recently at La Scala, the Bayerische Staatsoper, and regularly in Lyon, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Antwerp.
He guests with international orchestras such as the Royal Concertgebouw, San Francisco Symphony, DSO Berlin and Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, as well as the Philharmonia, BBC Symphony and most of the other leading UK orchestras.
He is a popular figure at the BBC Proms which, in 2019, commissioned fourteen living composers to write a birthday tribute to him. He is also a prolific recording artist with more than 120 CDs to date, including prize-winning discs of operas by Korngold, Birtwistle and Harvey. Martyn remains a Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Music in London, a post he has held since 2016.