Academy Symphonic Brass

Horn
Johan Stone
Kiersten Snow Gustafson
Annemarie Federle
Eleanor Blakeney

Trumpet
James Nash
Joseph Skypala
John Vernon
Eliza Talman
Adam Meyer
Rui Ribeiro
William Thomas

Trombone
Meggie Murphy
Guy Berry
Felix Rockhill
Jan Erik Kruijsse
Chris Brewster

Tuba
James Tavares
Callum Davis

Timpani
Matthew Brett

Percussion
Robert Wills
Matthew Brett
Chiao-An Chiang
Meadow Brooks

Principal trombonist of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Jörgen van Rijen is also much in demand as a soloist with a special commitment to promoting his instrument, developing new repertoire for the trombone and bringing the existing repertoire to a broader audience. He is a specialist on both the modern and baroque trombone. He has performed as a soloist in most European countries, as well as the United States, Canada, Japan, China, Korea, Russia, Singapore and Australia and performed concertos with orchestras including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, Taiwan Philharmonic, Nagoya Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Antwerp Symphony Orchestra under James MacMillan, Dallas Symphony Orchestra under Gustavo Gimeno, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under Jonathan Nott, the Orchestra of the Staatstheater Cottbus, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins.

He recently premiered Bryce Dessner’s Concerto for trombone and orchestra with the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra Heilbronn at the Koelner Philharmonie. The piece is a joint commission by the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra Heilbronn, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Orchester Philharmonique Royal de Liège and Orchester National d'Île-de-France, with whom further performances are planned.

Van Rijen was awarded the Netherlands Music Prize in 2004, the highest distinction in the field of music by the Dutch Ministry of Culture. In 2006 he received the prestigious Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award, which is presented yearly to a selection of the most promising and talented young international soloists and ensembles. He has won other major prizes, including first prizes at the international trombone competitions of Toulon and Guebwiller.

Many new pieces have been written for him, including a trombone concerto by Theo Verbey, and works by Jacob TV and Florian Magnus Maier. In the spring of 2012, van Rijen premiered a trombone concerto by Kalevi Aho that was written for him as a commission from the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, with concerts with the The Hague Philharmonic, the Oulu Sinfonia in Finland and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. In April 2017 he performed the world premiere of a trombone concerto by James MacMillan, composed for him with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Iván Fischer. He has since performed MacMillan’s concerto with orchestras in the USA, Finland, Japan, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany.

Van Rijen teaches at the Amsterdam Conservatory and is International Visiting Professor at the Royal Academy of Music. He is also an active chamber musician in ensembles such as the New Trombone Collective, RCO Brass and Brass United.

He plays exclusively on instruments built by Antoine Courtois, and has released five CDs on the label Channel Classics, including Fratres with members of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, which he recently performed at the Bach Festival in Dordrecht.

Michael Berkeley was born in 1948, the eldest son of the composer Sir Lennox Berkeley and a godson of Benjamin Britten.

He studied composition, singing, and piano at the Royal Academy of Music, but it was not until his late twenties, when he went to study with Richard Rodney Bennett, that Berkeley began to concentrate exclusively on composing. In 1977 he was awarded the Guinness Prize for Composition; two years later he was appointed Associate Composer to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Since then Berkeley’s music has been played all over the globe and by some of the world's finest musicians.

Major works of the 1980s include Gregorian Variations conducted in England and America by André Previn; the 1982 oratorio Or Shall We Die? to a text specially written by Ian McEwan, and made into a film by Richard Eyre; For the Savage Messiah, Songs of Awakening Love, composed for Heather Harper and performed at the 1988 Proms; the Concerto for Organ; Keening for the saxophonist John Harle; Fierce Tears I and Fierce Tears II for the oboist Nicholas Daniel; the Quartet Study and two pieces for strings, Coronach and Gethsemane fragment.

The 1990s began with the powerful and expressionist Concerto for Clarinet at the Huddersfield Festival while his first opera, Baa Baa Black Sheep, based on the childhood of Rudyard Kipling, was premiered at the Cheltenham Festival to enormous public and critical acclaim in 1993. It was subsequently broadcast by BBC Radio and Television andrecorded on CD for Chandos. The London Symphony Orchestra under Colin Davis premiered and toured Secret Garden, and then in August 1998, The Garden of Earthly Delights, a BBC Proms commission, was premiered by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and Mstislav Rostropovich.

As part of Berkeley's tenure as Composer in Association to the BBC National Orchestra of Wales he was commissioned to write three new works. The second, the Concerto for Orchestra, was premiered at the 2005 Proms. This piece, as with most of Berkeley’s significant orchestral work, much of his chamber music and his operas, is available on CD as part of the Chandos Berkeley Edition. His final commission for BBC NOW was for chorus and orchestra, a haunting lament written in memory of a young family friend, Gabriel Bailey, and Berkeley's long-time friend and collaborator, Richard Hickox.

Berkeley’s second opera, Jane Eyre, written to David Malouf's libretto, has been produced in the UK, Australia and America. His third opera, For You, was written to a libretto by Ian McEwan and commissioned by Music Theatre Wales. It was released on the Signum label.

He has written incidental music for radio and three film scores: Captive (1986), starring Oliver Reed and Irina Brook, directed by Paul Mayersberg for which he collaborated with The Edge of U2; Goldeneye (1991), a dramatised life of Ian Fleming starring Charles Dance and directed by Don Boyd, and another Don Boyd film, Twenty One (1991) starring Patsy Kensit and Rufus Sewell.

For ten years from 1995, Berkeley was Artistic Director of the Cheltenham International Music Festival, where he premiered over a hundred new works and initiated a policy of having a contemporary work in every programme. He built the music programme for the Sydney Festival for three years at the beginning of the millennium and, with Judith Weir and the late Anthony Payne, jointly directed the Spitalfields Festival in the previous decade. He was the featured composer for the New York Philharmusica. He currently presents BBC Radio 3's Private Passions, which won the Broadcasting Press Guild's Radio Programme of the Year Award in 1996, and was Chairman of the Governors of The Royal Ballet for nine years until 2012.

Since 2010, Berkeley’s compositions have included an Oboe Quintet, Into the Ravine for Nicholas Daniel and the Carducci String Quartet and Three Rilke Sonnets for Claire Booth and the Nash Ensemble, who gave a second performance at the Wigmore Hall.

Recent commissions have included a new anthem for the enthronement of the new Archbishop of Canterbury (Listen, Listen, O my Child), Cabaret Songs for Barbara Hannigan and Angela Hewitt, a Motet (Super Flumina Babylonis) commissioned by the RVW Trust for the Festival of St Cecilia at Westminster Cathedral, and the new Carol for the 2016 Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge, which was broadcast worldwide on Christmas Eve. He also wrote two major orchestral scores, a Violin Concerto premiered by Chloë Hanslip at the BBC Proms in 2016 and Two Farewells for cello and orchestra for the VIVACELLO Festival in Moscow in 2017. For his 70th birthday in 2018, he was commissioned by Wigmore Hall for a celebration concert by Britten Sinfonia and wrote a new Mass for Wells Cathedral.

He was appointed a CBE for services to music in the Queen's Birthday Honours published on June 16th 2012. In 2013 he was also appointed a non-party political member of the House of Lords.