JOHN OWEN EDWARDS

John Owen Edwards was born in Kensal, Cumbria. Hadow Scholar in composition Worcester College 1970-73. West End credits include the Royal Variety Performance 1975, Billy, Side by Side by Sondheim, A Chorus Line, Annie, Mahagonny Songspiel, Oklahoma!, Mitford Girls, Evita, The Sloane Ranger Review, and Torch Song Trilogy. He has also spent two seasons as the musical director at the Chichester Festival Theatre. In 1979 he conducted Stars of World Ballet in Australia, and his orchestration of The Swan for Maya Plisetskaya is now used exclusively at the Bolshoi, Moscow. He has also conducted many operas for the Singers Company including La Perichole broadcast by BBC2, The Barber of Seville, and La Boheme, and has been a guest conductor for Opera North, Buxton Festival Opera and the Royal Academy of Music's Opera School. Premieres he has given include works by Elizabeth Lutyens and Stephen Oliver, the most recent being Oliver's A Man of Feeling for the King's Head Theatre and Granada Television. Last year marked his debut in the Royal Festival Hall conducting the London Concert Orchestra in a programme of Humperdinck, Bizet and Prokofiev. His own musical Canary Blunt written with David Firth was successfully staged at Latchmere last year and the cast album has been issued by That's Entertainment Records. For radio, John has recorded three series of The Jason Explanation, Julian Slade's Trelawney, and adaptation of E. F. Benson's Lucia books and The Lorenzacchio Story. He has taught at Morley College and been a professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama since 1977, where he has conducted full scale productions of Company, and Leonard Bernstein's Wonderful Town. Recently he returned from a concert tour of Southeast Asia with Academia Arcadiana, a chamber ensemble with whom he appears regularly. John was the musical supervisor on The Ratepayers' Iolanthe and The Metropolitan Mikado. Earlier this year he recorded Dido and Aeneas for London Weekend Television.

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