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
guest conducting the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Gothenburg Symphony
and Malmö 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], DJ/composer Gabriel Prokofiev and Squarepusher),
an ensemble dedicated to improvisation. This season they will tour Terry
Riley's A Rainbow in Curved Air alongside Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells.
Highlights with the BBC Concert Orchestra in recent years (with whom
Hazlewood has a close relationship) have included performances at the
BBC Proms, Urban Classic, Kurt Weill's forgotten masterpiece Lost in
the Stars, and the world premiere of Will Gregory's opera 'Piccard in
Space', both at London's SouthBank Centre.
From 2000-7 Hazlewood was Music Director of Dimpho di Kopane in Cape
Town. For them he devised the music for The 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 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 is a regular
presence on Radio 2, in shows which have won him 3 Sony Awards.
August '09 saw the formation of a new breed of orchestral festival on
the Somerset Levels: 'Charles Hazlewood's Play The Field' It was
broadcast on Radio 2 and attended by over 4,000 people. Now renamed
'Orchestra In A Field', the festival will return in Summer 2012. Click
here for Play the Field website.
Upcoming highlights also include the first performances from Hazlewood's
brand new opera company in Johannesburg, ('Soweto Messiah'), the formation
of Britain's first national disabled orchestra 'Paraorchestra' to coincide
with the Paraolympics, a new residency for Army of Generals in Bristol,
Festival Hall projects with the Philharmonia, the National Youth Orchestra
and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and appearances with the
BBC Concert Orchestra at the BBC Proms. Highlights further afield include
engagements with Malmö Symphony, Uppsala Chamber Orchestra, Nordic
Chamber Orchestra and the Malaysian Philharmonic.
