About

John Andrews has twice won the BBC Music Magazine Award: for Malcolm Arnold’s The Dancing Master (2021); and J.F. Lampe’s The Dragon of Wantley (2023). He is Principal Guest Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra and Artist-in-Association with the English Symphony Orchestra
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. He appears regularly with the BBC Concert Orchestra and at the English Music Festival, as well as conducting over 40 operas for The Grange Festival, Opera Holland Park, English Touring Opera, Garsington Opera, Buxton International Festival and the Volkstheater Rostock. 
He has made over twenty recordings for Resonus Classics, Decca Classics, Dutton Epoch, Toccata Classics, Retrospect Opera and EM records, conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the BBC Singers, BBC Philharmonic, Scottish Opera and the Manchester Camerata. Alongside the two BBC Music Magazine Awards, his recording of Smyth’s Der Wald won Presto Music’s ‘Rediscovery of the Year’ in 2023.
2024 sees the release of discs featuring Grace Williams, Francis Poulenc and C.V Stanford; a return to the English Music Festival with the ESO, West Green Opera with the BBC Concert Orchestra, and to Opera Holland Park for the revival of Il segreto di Susanna, as well as recordings of music by Granville Bantock, Arthur Sullivan and Errollyn Wallen.    

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.