Brief Biography
Charles Hazlewood won first prize in the 1995 EBU Conducting Competition.
He made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2003, his BBC Proms debut in 2006.
He works regularly with great orchestras around the globe, this Season
making his debut with the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Gothenburg
Symphony and Malmo Symphony in Sweden, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
and the Philharmonia in London. He is Music Director of the contemporary
ensemble Excellent Device! and the period instrument orchestra Army
of Generals.
In 2008 he founded The Charles Hazlewood All Stars at Glastonbury Festival
(including Goldfrapp's Will Gregory, Portishead's Adrian Utley, Cian
[Super Furry Animals] and DJ/composer Gabriel Prokofiev), an ensemble
dedicated to improvisation.
Highlights with the BBC Concert Orchestra this year (with whom Hazlewood
has had a close relationship for several years) have included performances
at the BBC Proms, and Kurt Weill's forgotten masterpiece Lost in the
Stars at London's South Bank Centre.
From 2000-7 Hazlewood was Music Director of Dimpho di Kopane in Cape
Town. For them he devised the music forThe Mysteries, The Beggar's Opera,
The Snow Queen (West End and worldwide), and was conductor of their
feature film U Carmen e-Khayelitsha which won Best Film at the Berlin
Film Festival 2005.
As part of his mission to engage the maximum number of people with music,
Hazlewood has authored and conducted the music in multiple TV films,
on Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and this year a landmark
series for BBC2 "The Birth of British Music". He regularly
performs open-heart surgery on great music with the BBC Orchestras for
Radio 3's Discovering Music, and hosts The Charles Hazlewood Show on
Radio 2 exploring his vast and catholic music tastes. The show has won
Hazlewood 3 Sony Awards.
In August '09 Charles unveiled his latest venture, Play the Field, a
new breed of orchestral festival on his farm in Somerset. It was broadcast
on Radio 2 and attended by over 4,000 people. Play the Field will return
in 2011.
Highlights of 2010 include the first performances from Hazlewood's brand
new opera company in Johannesburg in a project based around Messiah,
an ambitious year-long project injecting 21st century fire into songs
from The Beggar's Opera (Roundhouse London, recording and nationwide
tour), and an attempt to create the world's largest orchestra in Birmingham
in October.
