Conductors 2012/2013
- Gerben Grooten (South Africa/Netherlands) – Conductor of the NYO for the opera Fairy Queen in March/April
- Mark Hampson (United Kingdom) – Leads the NYO Brass in June
- Scott Gabriel (Canada) – National Youth Concert Orchestra in June/July
- Bjørn Breistein (Norway) – National Youth Wind Orchestra in December
- Fredrik Burstedt (Sweden) – National Youth String Orchestra in December
2013
- Sir Roger Norrington (United Kingdom) – comes on tour to South Africa with the Zurich Chamber Orchestra in January and members of the National Youth Orchestra will join them for performances in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
In March/April 2012 the National Youth Orchestra will be conducted by Gerben Grooten for Purcell’s Fairy Queen with the Cape Festival
Netherlands-born Gerben Grooten’s involvement in music dates from his childhood. He travelled and worked with orchestras from the age of 14, performing, touring and recording in Europe, Africa and North America, and was admitted to the Rotterdam Conservatory at the age of 16. He holds a master’s degree in Classical Orchestral Percussion and Choir and Orchestra Conducting and his other instruments include piano and cello. Over the last 20 years he has conducted a variety of orchestras, choirs and contemporary ensembles in a wide range of musical styles. Gerben’s heart has always been in music education and when he was 25 he became the deputy director and project coordinator at a creative arts institution of 2 000 students, where he also taught classical percussion and conducted the orchestra and the choir. He has also worked with many organisations and universities around the world presenting workshops and team-building and leadership seminars in the areas of life-skills and arts management. In 2005 Gerben and his wife Mieke came to work in South Africa in music and art education. Gerben is the creative director for the Hatfield Art Centre in Pretoria, an institution with two music schools, a full-time academy, a music publishing house and a record company. He also heads the worship department at Hatfield Christian Church where he is responsible for the music and art broadcast on radio and television.
Since arriving in South Africa, Gerben has been involved with various universities and with musical and TV productions all over the country as both player and conductor. Most recently he has conducted the Free State Symphony Orchestra and been involved with the South African National Youth Orchestras as conductor and teacher. He is at present principal conductor for the Pretoria Symphony Orchestra and the Pretoria Bach Choir. Excited by the amount of young talent in this country, Gerben is a respected adjudicator at art schools and cultural festivals and is.
In June Mark Hampson (UK) comes to Johannesburg for our first brass ensemble course, National Youth Brass
Since then he has been a member of the orchestra in Gran Canaria and a founder member of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. He has also played every Lucerne Festival Orchestra project and has collaborated with the London Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, NDR Hannover, Tonhalle Orchestra(Zurich),City of Birmingham Orchestra, Sinfonica Toscanini(Parma), Deutsche Symphonie Orchester (Berlin) and Cadaquez Orchestra along with most of the orchestras in Spain. He is also a member of various brass ensembles including World Brass Ensemble, Mahler Chamber Brass, Canarian Brass Quintet and Lucerne Festival Orchestra brass.
He has coached and taught for the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra(Caracas),
In June the National Youth Concert Orchestra will be conducted by Scott Gabriel (Canada)
Conductor: Scott Gabriel
Scott Gabriel grew up in the Middle East and in the Canadian west, was educated at the Universities of Calgary and Toronto and now lives in Montreal. Scott believes that the foundation for great music-making lies in the relationships among the performers. Inspired by a passion for a widely varied musical repertoire, Scott has worked with orchestras throughout Canada, has been Director of Calgary’s Gregorian Chant Choir, founded Toronto’s ‘The Friends of Gravity’, an experimental theatre and music ensemble and has been a resident artist at the celebrated Banff Centre for the Arts. Sought after as a conductor and coach, he has worked with young and professional ensembles throughout Canada. He is currently Artistic Director and Conductor of the Westmount Youth Orchestra and Music Director at St Laurent Church, of the McGill Conservatory Choir, and of the fresh new Singers’ Club de Montréal. He is also Assistant Music Director of the Montreal Boy Choir School and trumpet and chamber music instructor at the McGill Conservatory.
In December the National Youth Wind Orchestra will be conducted by Bjørn Breistein (Norway)
Bjørn Breistein was born in 1973 in Bergen, Norway. He studied at the Grieg Academy in Bergen, and is a professional euphonium player in the Bergen Military Band. As a euphonium soloist he has won three national competitions in Norway, and has also appeared as a soloist in Germany, Scotland and New Zealand.
Bjørn is now increasingly focusing on conducting – he has attended master classes in Norway, the Czech Republic and Germany with teachers such as Kirk Trevor, Johannes Schlaefli, Tsung Yeh, Bjørn Sagstad, Rolf Gupta, Colin Metters and the late Alan Hazeldine. As a conductor, Bjørn has a special interest in contemporary music. He has conducted premieres of the works of several Norwegian composers, including Jan Erik Mikalsen, Stig Nordhagen and Johan Modahl Leiva. He is especially fond of Torstein Aagaard-Nilsen’s compositions, and has conducted his works on many occasions.
This season, Bjørn conducts the Sandviken Wind Band; the current Norwegian national champions. He also works with the Bergen Symphonic Band, many of the members of which study at the Grieg Academy. Bjørn has worked with the Pleven Philharmonic Orchestra in Bulgaria where this September he spent three weeks conducting two concerts and recording three concertos for tuba and orchestra. The soloist was Eirik Gjerdevik, and the record will be relased under the Lawo Classics label in 2012.
Bjørn is excited to be back in South Africa where he will be conducting the Natonal Youth Wind Orchestra for the third consecutive year, and looks forward to introducing music by his favourite contemporary composers to our musicians and audience.
In December the National Youth String Orchestra will be conducted by Fredrik Burstedt (Sweden)
The young Swedish conductor and violinist Fredrik Busted has in recent times established himself as a musician with an unique ability to capture an audience and intrigue the individual listener. He is in the initial stages of a promising career as a conductor and has already been the guest conductor in a number of professional orchestras in Sweden and abroad.
Fredrik received in first musical instruction from his father, a well-known violinist and pedagogue and he later continued his violin studies with Leo Berlin at the Royal University College of Music in Stockholm and later with David Takeno. He made his solo-debut with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1996 and was subsequently invited as soloist in orchestras all over Europe. Fredrik’s pronounced interest in contemporary music has resulted in the commissioning of many new pieces, some of which he has recorded for the CD “Cordes sur bois” – a Swedish Grammy Award Nominee in 2005.
Fredrik Burstedt is considered one of Scandinavia’s leading concert masters, and has been invited in this function to most Swedish orchestras. Since 2002 he is First Concert Master in the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra.
Since 1999 he works regularly with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and as concert master and principal player he has worked closely with renowned conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Gustavo Dudamel and Daniel Harding. In 2005 he played for the first time in the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, the hand picked orchestra consisting of the absolute elite of international orchestra musicians.
Fredrik Burstedt commenced his conducting studies in 2005 and was after just one year admitted to Professor Jorma Panula’s Diploma class at the Royal University College of Music in Stockholm. After participating in the Svenska Dirigentpriset (Swedish Conducting Prize) competition in 2006, Fredrik Burstedt was awarded the first Sixten Ehrling Prize for Young Conductors.
Fredrik enjoys accompanying singers and instrumentalists alike, and has worked with prominent soloists, such as pianists Per Tengstrand and Hans Leygraf and Copenhagen Opera’s first soprano, Gitta-Maria Sjöberg. During the season 07/08 he conducted the symphony orchestras of Helsingborg, Gävle and Norrköping as well as Italy’s I Pomeriggi Musicali and the NorrlandsOperan Symphony Orchestra in Umeå. He also led a concert performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute in Luleå’s new House of Culture and the chamber version of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in Stockholm and Helsingborg.
In the seasons 08/09, 09/10 and 10/11 Fredrik has established himself as one of the most coming, young conductors in Sweden. He has been working with most of the Swedish orchestras, such as Royal Philharmonic orchestra, Norrköping Symphony orchestra and Gävle Symphony orchestra. Most recently he has conducted “Swan Lake” with the Norrlands Symphony orchestra “Swanlake” and worked with Västerås Sinfonietta and the violinist Karen Gomyo.
In January 2013 Sir Roger Norrington conducts the Zurich Chamber Orchestra with members of the SA National Youth Orchestra
For nearly fifty years Roger Norrington has been at the forefront of the movement for historically informed orchestral playing. Whether with his own London Classical Players in the 1980’s with his Stuttgart Radio Symphony or Camerata Salzburg in recent years, or with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment from its foundation, he has sought to put modern players in touch with the historical style of the music they play. The work involves orchestra size and seating, tempo, phrasing, articulation and sound.
Sir Roger (he was knighted by the Queen in 1997) sang and played the violin from a young age, and began to conduct at Cambridge. He studied at the Royal College of Music under Sir Adrian Boult and at the same time founded the first of several groups for the performance of early music, the Heinrich Schütz Choir. This was followed ten years later by the London Classical Players, which achieved worldwide fame with their dramatic recordings of the 9 Beethoven Symphonies. Works by Haydn, Mozart, Berlioz, Brahms, Bruckner, and many others followed, and established Norrington as a key exponent of historical style.
As early as 1966 Norrington had been made Music Director of the new and exciting Kent Opera. Here again he introduced innovative thinking about orchestra size, playing style and tempi, particularly with the earlier repertoire. He brought to opera the distinguished directors Jonathan Miller and Nicholas Hytner. He conducted many hundreds of performances for Kent and went on to work at Covent Garden and the English National Opera, for La Scala and La Fenice and at the Vienna Staatsoper.
The choir, the orchestra and the opera had done their pioneering work and Norrington moved on to share his historical findings with more “modern” orchestras, choirs and opera companies. He is a frequent guest with many of the world’s major orchestras – the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic, the Deutsche Symphonie, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Concertgebouw Orkest, l’Orchestre de Paris, the NHK in Tokyo, and the Philharmonia in London. In the US he has appeared over many years with the Boston, Chicago and San Francisco Symphonies, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cincinnati and Detroit Symphonies, and the LA Philharmonic.
More permanent posts with orchestras have included Chief Conductor of the
Bournemouth Sinfonietta, Music Director of the Orchestra of St Lukes in New York, Chief Conductor (now Emeritus) of the Salzburg Camerata and (since 1998) Chief Conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra. He became Principal Conductor of the Zurich Chamber Orchestra in 2011.
