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 Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and the Manchester Camerata.
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.
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 has made over twenty recordings and appears regularly with the BBC Concert Orchestra and at the English Music Festival. 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 is Principal Guest Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra and Artist-in-Association with the English Symphony Orchestra.
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.