Directory
Conductor, Musicologist
James Ross won scholarships to Harrow School in London and to Oxford University, where he studied both history and music, writing a doctorate on French opera and winning the Sir Donald Tovey Memorial Prize. He was a finalist in the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra’s 1998 Conducting Competition and is Music Director of the St Albans Symphony Orchestra, Oxford’s Christ Church Festival Orchestra, the Welwyn Garden City Orchestra and Chorus, and the Royal College of Paediatrics Orchestra and Chorus, and Associate Conductor of Midland Youth Orchestra in Birmingham, with whom he toured to the Banff International Festival in Canada in 2000. He also teaches at Oxford University, has written for Opera, English Historical Review, Musical Times and Music and Letters and is a co-author of French Music Since Berlioz, published later this year.
In 1996 he was an assistant for Bernard Haitink’s Don Carlos recording with The Royal Opera, London, and was music director for Sondheim’s Company at the Oxford Playhouse in 1998, where he also conducted Bizet’s Carmen in 1999 for the Oxford Operatic Society. His repertoire of over 350 works includes Baroque oratorios and classical symphonies, through Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Bruckner, Debussy and Mahler, including his Songs of a Wayfarer with Sir Thomas Allen, to 20th-Century works including Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and a significant number of first performances. He has conducted in Canada, U.S.A., France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bosnia, where he has toured twice with the Sarajevo Philharmonic, Serbia, China and Sri Lanka. His teachers have included Tsung Yeh, Zdenek Bilek, professor at Bratislava Conservatory, Canadian conductor Victor Feldbrill, Ernest Schelle in Switzerland, and Alan Hazeldine of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London; he has also received advice from Bernard Haitink, Paul Daniel and Peter Donohoe. He is a member of the Performers and Composers Section of the Incorporated Society of Musicians (UK) and of the Conductors Guild (USA).
Contact details and further information
Telephone or fax:+44 (0)1865 251510 or +44 (0)20 8864 4746
E-mail Dr James Ross
For further details, see James Ross' website