BBC Philharmonic & Rumon Gamba (Ralph Vaughan Williams)

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

BBC Philharmonic & Rumon Gamba (Ralph Vaughan Williams) · Rumon Gamba is a British conductor, born in 1972. He studied music in Durham and then at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he was taught by, among others, Colin Metters, George Hurst and Colin Davis. He was the first conducting student to obtain the DipRAM. In 1998 he won a prize in a BBC workshop for young conductors and joined the BBC Philharmonic, the Manchester orchestra.

Music and breakthrough

Gamba was chief conductor of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra from 2002 to 2010, and afterwards of NorrlandsOperan in the north of Sweden. In 2022 he became chief conductor of the Oulu Symphony Orchestra in Finland. He conducted the world premiere of the opera Two Boys by Nico Muhly at the English National Opera and in 2014 a complete Beethoven cycle in Umeå. He made more than fifty CDs for Chandos, including in the film music series. With the BBC Philharmonic he recorded works by, among others, Miklos Rozsa, Malcolm Arnold, Bernard Herrmann, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Influence

Those last recordings belong to the great repertoire of British film music. In 1948 Vaughan Williams wrote the music for the film Scott of the Antarctic, about the polar expedition of Robert Falcon Scott. The orchestra plays a cold, wide sound in it, with unusual instruments, and showed how a classical composer could carry a cinema film. Gamba and the orchestra brought that work back to attention.

Listening

• 
  Scott of the Antarctic Suite: Main Titles · BBC Philharmonic & Rumon Gamba (Ralph Vaughan Williams), 1948

In School of Rock

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• The Dream Factory: Film Reel 3^NL Reader

See also

• British concert composers (Denham and Ealing)