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Roy Goodman is probably the most active independent free-lance conductor in Europe. He became internationally famous in 1963 as the boy treble soloist in Allegri's Miserere with the Choir of King's College, Cambridge.
Roy Goodman is now well known for his work as director of the Brandenburg Consort (which he founded in 1975), the Parley of Instruments (which he co-founded with Peter Holman in 1979), the Hanover Band which he first directed in 1981, becoming Principal Conductor from 1986 to 1994 and the European Union Baroque Orchestra (of which he has been Music Director since 1989). For the past 15 years he has been increasingly in demand as a modern symphonic conductor.
When Roy Goodman completed his studies at the Royal College of Music in London in 1970 he was already well qualified as conductor, teacher, organist, violinist and musicologist. He received diplomas on both organ and violin - Fellow of the Royal College of Organists and Associate of the Royal College of Music - and then spent several years as a music teacher, later becoming Director of Music at the University of Kent in Canterbury and Director of Early Music Studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
From 1975-1985 much of Roy Goodman's career was spent as a violinist and concertmaster. He was Concertmaster for Iván Fischer, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Sir Charles Mackerras, Sir Roger Norrington, Sir Simon Rattle (- for his debut at Glyndebourne Opera, both W.A. Mozart's Figaro and Idomeneo). He played as a soloist with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields under Sir Neville Marriner, the Philharmonia Orchestra under Vladimir Ashkenazy and the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra under Peter Schreier.
An invitation to conduct the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1985 was the catalyst for an immensely flourishing new career as conductor. Within a few years Roy Goodman had recorded for CD the first ever performances on historic instruments of the complete symphonies by L.v. Beethoven, Cherubini, Schubert and Robert Schumann and Weber, as well as 60 symphonies by Haydn. He has conducted well over 100 CD’s for 10 different record companies ranging from Monteverdi's sacred vocal music to Gustav Holst's Planets including further orchestral and choral works by W.A. Mozart, Felix Mendelssohn and Berwald and important Baroque works by Purcell, Arcangelo Corelli, George Frideric Handel and J.S. Bach. His CD recordings of the complete Robert Schumann symphonies for RCA have received outstanding critical praise worldwide and his concerts include Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 at the Carnegie Hall in New York and L.v. Beethoven's Symphony Eroica at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall, London.
In 1994 Roy Goodman was invited as the first Principal Conductor of the Umeå Symphony Orchestra and the Swedish Northern Opera. He has also conducted operas by G.F. Handel and W.A. Mozart in Lisbon, at the Britten-Pears School in Snape, Fondation Royaumont in Paris and at Opera North in Leeds, Opera Northern Ireland in Belfast, Flanders Opera in Gent and Antwerpen, Staatstheater Mainz and as an annual guest from 1990-1998 at the Badisches Staatstheater in Karlsruhe. Last season he made his debut at the English National Opera with Gluck's Orpheus and at the Drottningholm Theatre Stockholm with a new Swedish opera Trädgården by Jonas Forssell.
Roy Goodman has had many other interesting invitations: he made a documentary film about W.A. Mozart's Prague Symphony for Dutch television with members of the Prague Chamber Orchestra; he has conducted a Sibelius 'birthday' concert for Finnish Television with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Helsinki; he won a 12 CD recording contract with BMG Classics/RCA Victor after a concert cycle of the complete symphonies of L.v. Beethoven in the Schleswig Holstein Festival and Missa Solemnis in the Alte Oper, Frankfurt; he recorded the complete Berwald symphonies in the Berwald Hall Stockholm with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra (his first project with them was Debussy, Leonard Bernstein and Dvorak); he recorded a CD of G. Holst's Planets on 'period' instruments with the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios in London; he was invited by the Netherlands Wind Ensemble to conduct the Symphony for Winds by Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony for Dutch Radio; he conducted the prestigious televised New Year's Day concert with the augmented Netherlands Wind Ensemble from the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam (1998); in 2003 he has been invited to direct a Mozart Festival in the Concertgebouw Amsterdam with the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra; he has conducted twenty world-premieres of contemporary music - working with composers in Canada, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and the USA (including the Concerto for Saxophone Quartet and orchestra by Philip Glass).
The coming season includes a return visit to Drottningholm for a new production of Giulio Cesare in 2001, an invitation to Stuttgart and San Francisco Opera companies for a production of Alcina, invitations to Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, Turku Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. In September 2000 he was appointed as Principal Conductor of the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra in Winnipeg. |
