Biography
Ryan Wigglesworth, who took up the position of Chief Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in September 2022, has established himself as one of the foremost composer-conductors of his generation. He was Principal Guest Conductor of the Hallé Orchestra from 2015 to 2018 and Composer in Residence at English National Opera. He held the Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellowship with the Cleveland Orchestra for the two seasons 2013/15 and 14/15 and was Composer-in-Residence at the 2018 Grafenegg Festival. In close partnership with the Royal Academy of Music, he recently founded the Knussen Chamber Orchestra which made both its Aldeburgh Festival and BBC Proms debuts in 2019.
Recent concerts include the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Finnish Radio Symphony, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, DSO Berlin, Bergen Philharmonic, Swedish Radio SO, Tokyo, Seattle, Melbourne, Lahti Symphony, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony, London Philharmonic, Philharmonia, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, BBC Symphony, BBC Scottish Symphony, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. He returned to the Proms in 2023 for Beethoven 9 and the UK premiere of Kurtag’s opera Endgame, and to the Aldeburgh Festival for further concerts with the Knussen Chamber Orchestra.
Also active as a pianist, recent play/direct projects across Europe and the Far East have included concertos by Mozart and Beethoven, and he regularly appears in recital partnering with Mark Padmore, Lawrence Power and Sophie Bevan.
One of the leading composers of his day, his first opera, The Winter’s Tale, premiered at ENO in February 2017 in a production directed by Rory Kinnear and conducted by the composer. Other works include commissions from the Royal Concertgebouw and Cleveland orchestras, BBC Symphony (BBC Proms), song cycles for Sophie Bevan (Wigmore Hall/Grafenegg) and Mark Padmore (Aldeburgh Festival/Wigmore Hall). Further performances of his works have been directed by, amongst others, Sir Andrew Davis, Edward Gardner, Pablo Heras-Casado, Vladimir Jurowski, Oliver Knussen, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Franz Welser-Möst. Recent and current projects include a song cycle for Roderick Williams (Barbican), a piano concerto for Marc-André Hamelin (BBC Proms), and Magnificat, for soprano, chorus and orchestra, co-commissioned by the Bergen Philharmonic and Hallé.
Born in Yorkshire, he studied at New College, Oxford and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Between 2007-9 he was a Lecturer at Cambridge University where he was also a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. In January 2019 he took up the position of Sir Richard Rodney Bennett Professor at the Royal Academy of Music.
