Martin André

The title of this article is ambiguous. For other people with a similar name see André Martin .

Martin André (born 1960 in West Wickham , London Borough of Bromley ) is a British conductor .

Life

After taking piano and violin lessons at the Yehudi Menuhin School , André studied music at Cambridge University .

As an opera conductor

In 1982 he made his debut as conductor of Verdi's Aida at the Welsh National Opera (WNO) and since then he has developed a broad repertoire - albeit with a clear focus: Mozart , Verdi , Janáček . At the WNO he conducted three operas by Verdi ( Ernani , Rigoletto and Falstaff ) as well as Janáček's Jenůfa , Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin .

André is one of the few conductors who has worked in all of Great Britain's major opera houses. At the Royal Opera House he conducted Verdi's Un ballo in maschera , at the English National Opera he conducted Mozart, Prokofjew and the world premiere of John Buller's Bakxai , a setting by Euripides ' Bakchantes , at the Scottish Opera in Glasgow he conducted works by Janáček, Lehárs and Mozart's. For the Glyndebourne Touring Opera he conducted the UK premiere of the opera Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke by the German composer Siegfried Matthus and The Makropulos Case by Leoš Janáček.

From 1993 to 1996 André was Music Director of the English Touring Opera . There he conducted three Mozart operas ( Le nozze di Figaro , Die Entführung aus dem Seraglio and Così fan tutte ) as well as Lehár's The Merry Widow , Puccini's La Bohème , Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice and Massenet's Werther . As a result, a long-term collaboration developed with Opera North in Leeds, which included productions of works by Falla , Gounod , Janáček, Martinů , Puccini , Rachmaninow and Verdi . In 2000 he conducted a live broadcast of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro for the BBC TV program Music Live , with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment . For the Garsington Opera Festival , he worked on Stravinsky's Rake’s Progress in 2008 , the English premiere of the comic opera Mirandolina by Bohuslav Martinů in 2009, a new production of Offenbach's Orphée aux enfers in 2010 , Mozart's Magic Flute in 2011 and Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel in 2013 .

His international career began in 1986 with the North American premiere of Janáček's From a House of the Dead at the Vancouver Opera . He conducted Bizet's Carmen at the Seattle Opera and Cologne Opera . He also made guest appearances at the Württemberg State Opera in Stuttgart and in New Zealand. At the Opera Zuid in the Netherlands he worked on The Makropulos Affair , and at the National Theater in Prague he was a guest conductor of Martinů's opera Julietta with the Opera North ensemble . In the 2007/08 season he worked on a triptych evening at the Greek National Opera , consisting of Stravinsky's Maura , Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins and Puccini's Gianni Schicchi . From 2010 to 2013 he was artistic director of the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in Lisbon, where he conducted the jazz opera Blue Monday by George Gershwin , Mascagnis Cavalleria rusticana , Puccini's Gianni Schicchi , Verdi's Don Carlos and the rarely performed opera Thaïs by Jules Massenet . On the occasion of Verdi's jubilee in 2013, he presented his works Il trovatore , La traviata and Rigoletto in Lisbon .

Martin André has been cooperating with Den Jyske Opera in Aarhus, Denmark, since 2014 , where he took over the musical direction of the new productions of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor (2014) and Mascagni's L'amico Fritz (2015). In March 2016 he conducted Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride for the English Touring Opera

In the concert hall

Conducting in the concert hall is an important part of his work. He conducted the English Chamber Orchestra , the Northern Sinfonia and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra , worked regularly with the Dutch Limburgs Symfonie Orkest , the Portuguese Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música and the Norwegian Collegium Musicum Bergen . Martin Andre has made guest appearances throughout Europe, in Israel, Mexico, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand as well as in the United States.

He also likes to conduct Mozart in the concert hall, as well as the Nordic composers Gustav Holst and Carl Nielsen , as well as the Russian Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Dmitri Dmitrijewitsch Shostakovich . During his activity as Artistic Director of the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in Lisbon from 2010 to 2013, he was also responsible for directing the National Symphony Orchestra and its concerts. On one weekend he conducted all of Mozart's symphonies, and he also devoted himself to major choral and orchestral works by Bruckner , Janáček, Sibelius , Strauss and Tchaikovsky. In 2014 he conducted five Danish orchestras as part of a nationwide tour. As part of his teaching activities, he also works continuously as a conductor at the Royal College of Music and the Trinity College of Music , where he also presented rarely performed works by Witold Lutosławski and Andrzej Panufnik .

Martin André also conducted a string orchestra for a live screening of Hitchcock's Psycho , made his debut in 2014 with A Christmas Carol by Neil Brand with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and has also worked in Funchal, Madeira, Thailand and - with works by Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky - with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra .

As a university professor

Martin André has been teaching at the Royal College of Music in London since 2000 and was made a Fellow of the College in 2014. There he conducts large choir and orchestra concerts, teaches young conductors and works with the orchestra's individual groups of instruments. In 2006 he founded the Portuguese National Youth Orchestra , which is called Momentum Perpetuum . He directed this ensemble for five years and performed with it very successfully in Italy. Since 2014 he has also been teaching at Trinity College of Music in Greenwich.

Award

• 1996: Arts Foundation Conducting Fellowship

Web links

• Martin André , official website
• Martin André at Operabase (engagements and dates)
• Martin André in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Greek National Opera , short biography of the conductor

Individual evidence

1. ↑ BBC : A Christmas Carol, BBC Performing Groups Best of 2014 , accessed July 5, 2016.
2. ↑ dnoiticias: Martin André e Jorge Almeida no sábado com OCM , accessed on July 5, 2016.
3. ↑ Royal College of Music (London): List of Fellows ( Memento of the original from September 18, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed July 4, 2016.