Opera Scotland

Michael Rosewell Suggest updates

English conductor.

Michael Rosewell has been music director of English Touring Opera since 2009 and is also artistic director of the London Phoenix Ensemble and Director of Opera for the Benjamin Britten International Opera School at the Royal College of Music, London.

He trained in London at the Royal College of Music, studying conducting (with Norman Del Mar), accompaniment (with Robert Sutherland) and double bass (with Rodney Slatford), and was awarded a scholarship and major prizes in conducting and piano accompaniment.  He began his career as assistant to Claudio Abbado at the Vienna State Opera, working with many of the world's great singers and conductors. In Germany he then had a series of conducting appointments in Kassel, Wiesbaden and Mannheim. In Britain, he has conducted at English National Opera, the London Handel Festival and the Aldeburgh, Perth, Bath and Buxton Festivals, and has also worked at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. As associate conductor for the London Handel Society, he has helped reintroduce many rarely performed Handel operas.

Operatic repertoire with ETO includes The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Eugene Onegin, Jenůfa, Kátya Kabanová, Il Tabarro, Gianni Schicchi, Teseo, Norma and Simon Boccanegra. For the Royal College of Music he has conducted L'Heure Espagnole, L'Enfant et les Sortilèges, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Coronation of Poppea. He also  conducted Stephen Oliver's Timon of Athens and The Magic Flute for ENO, The Turn of the Screw at the Buxton Festival and Savitri at Montepulciano in Tuscany.

He has a close affinity with the works of Benjamin Britten, and has conducted performances of many of the works. He was invited by the Aldeburgh Festival to conduct A Midsummer Night's Dream in Aldeburgh's Jubilee Hall, the first performances in that venue since the 1960 premiere. He also gave the first performances of Britten's youthful ballet score Plymouth Town at Aldeburgh in 2004. His performances of The Rape of Lucretia in Cincinatti won an award from the American Opera Association.

His non-operatic work has included concerts with a number of German orchestras, including Leipzig, Stuttgart, Koblenz, Heidelberg and Baden-Baden. During his period in Vienna he toured widely as orchestral pianist with the Vienna Philharmonic. He has also conducted in Paris and Zagreb. In Britain he has worked with the London Mozart Players, English Chamber Orchestra, BT Scottish Ensemble, and London Phoenix Ensemble.