Conductor
La Bayadère Diana and Acteon Paquita Tales of Hoffmann |
Born in London, John Lanchbery
won the Henry Smart
Scholarship in Composition in
1942 which enabled him to study
at the Royal Academy of Music,
where his teachers included Sir
Henry Wood. During the war he
served in the Royal Armoured
Corps, and at the war's end,
returned to the Royal Academy
to complete his
studies.
Mr. Lanchbery spent two years in
his first professional conducting
post as the Music Director of
London's Metropolitan Ballet.
He then went on to work with
the Sadler's Wells Ballet, serving
as the Principal Conductor of the
company, later known as The
Royal Ballet, from 1960-1972.
After a tour with The Australian
Ballet to the United States in
1970, Mr. Lanchbery became
that company's guest conductor
and was subsequently appointed
the company's Music Director in
1972.
Mr. Lanchbery arranged the
scores for Sir Frederick Ashton's
ballet La Fille Mal
Gardée, and the
Franz Liszt music for Kenneth
MacMillan's full-length ballet,
Mayerling, which was
given its World Premiere in the
Spring of 1978 at Covent
Garden. He arranged the Franz Lehar
score for the first full-length ballet
production of The Merry
Widow by The Australian Ballet,
and subsequently conducted the
Adelaide Symphony and Singers in a
1976 recording of highlights from
The Merry Widow, which
earned him a Gold Record in 1977.
Mr. Lanchbery has composed music
for films and various BBC sound and
television programs, and his work on
the film score for The Tales of
Beatrix Potter was highly
acclaimed. Other film score
arrangements include Evil Under
the Sun and the
Oscar-nominated The Turning
Point. Most recently, Mr.
Lanchbery arranged a score for the
special restoration of D. W. Griffith's
silent film classic The Birth of a
Nation (1915), and composed
an original score for John Ford's silent
film The Iron Horse
(1924).
While maintaining his close
association with The Royal Ballet,
Mr. Lanchbery appears regularly as
ballet conductor with many of the
world's leading opera houses
including Paris, Stockholm, Rio de
Janeiro, New York and Houston. He
has also toured with The Australian
Ballet to Japan, Russia, China and
London. He recently returned to The
Australian Ballet for a year as chief
conductor, which included the
company's 1990 summer tour of the
United
States.
John Lanchbery has received many
honors. He was the first foreign
conductor to receive the Bolshoi
Medal. In 1989, he was awarded the
Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award
from the Royal Academy of Dance
and the Carina Ari Medal, presented
by HRH Princess Christina of Sweden
"for the furtherance of the Art of
Dance." In 1991, he was awarded the
OBE in the New Year's Honours
List. |
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