John Andrews has conducted many of the UK’s leading orchestras and ensembles, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the BBC Singers, BBC Philharmonic, The Orchestra of Scottish Opera, The Royal Ballet Sinfonia, The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, The London Mozart Players, the Academy of Ancient Music and the Manchester Camerata. He is Principal Guest Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra.
He has won the BBC Music Magazine Award three times: for Malcolm Arnold’s The Dancing Master (2021); J.F. Lampe’s The Dragon of Wantley (2023) and British Piano Concertos (2024). Alongside the BBC Music Magazine Awards, his recording of Smyth’s Der Wald won Presto Music’s ‘Rediscovery of the Year’ in 2023 and his recording of Orchestral Works by Grace Williams was shortlisted for a Gramophone Award in 2024, all for Resonus Classics.
John has conducted over 40 operas for The Grange Festival, Opera Holland Park, English Touring Opera, Garsington Opera, Buxton International Festival and the Volkstheater Rostock. He has gained a formidable reputation for bringing neglected masterpieces back to public attention. Building on his early discoveries of the unloved corners of Italian bel canto and the English baroque, he has championed composers from Eccles, Arne and Lampe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Arnold, Lutyens and Maconchy in the twentieth and twenty-first.
2025-6 includes two concerts with Manchester Camerata joining pianist Alexandra Dariescu and mezzo-soprano Idunnu Münch; a return to the English Music Festival with the London Mozart Players; a collaboration with Charlie Lovell-Jones on the Dyson Violin Concerto; a debut collaboration with the orchestra of English National Opera and a reunion with the Orpheus Sinfonia at West Green Opera and a reunion with Errollyn Wallen creating her new community opera ‘A Christmas Miracle.’
Other releases and broadcasts this year include Friday Night is Music Night with Ermonela Jaho and the BBC Concert Orchestra; a disc of 20th-Century clarinet concertos with Peter Cigleris and the London Mozart Players; Peter Warlock with the Royal Ballet Sinfonia; Gilbert and Sullivan with David Webb and the Academy of Ancient Music (the first on period instruments) and following their hugely successful collaboration on Avril Coleridge-Taylor, a further disc of British Piano Concertos with Samantha Ege.
Born in Nairobi and brought up in Manchester, John graduated from Cambridge University with a Ph.D in music and history. He now lives in London with his wife, children, three cats, two chincillas and a corn-snake.