Raymond Gubbay

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Raymond Gubbay (born North West London, 1946) is a classical music promoter and impresario based in London. In the programme to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of his starting out as a promoter, it says that after arranging small scale concerts around the UK, he began gradually to promote in London. He now presents more than seventy performances each year at London's Royal Albert Hall and hundreds more around the UK and in Europe and Australia.

Raymond Gubbay has been promoting concerts and musical production for forty years. In 1966 he started on his own, presenting concerts with three or four singers and a pianist at small halls and theatres around the country. He began promoting in London in 1968, first on South Bank (at the newly opened Queen Elizabeth Hall) and later at the Royal Festival Hall, and from the early 1970s on at the Royal Albert Hall.

The opening of the Barbican in 1982 allowed him to greatly expand the number of London concerts and he is regarded as having greatly helped the Barbican to establish itself at a difficult time after the opening. Among the large number of well-known names he has worked with at the Barbican are Pavarotti, Kiri Te Kanawa, James Galway, Victor Borge, Ray Charles, Henry Mancini, Yehudi Menuhin, and all four London symphony orchestras. His Teddy Bears concerts introduced thousands of young children to the concert hall in an informal and light-hearted way. At the Royal Festival Hall, he has presented hundreds of concerts including the four-concert Fiftieth Birthday series by violin virtuoso, Itzhak Perlman.

At the Royal Albert Hall, "Classical Spectacular" has enjoyed huge success with regular runs of six performances at a time, almost unheard of in the field of classical music, and over one hundred and fifty sold-out performances during the last few years. The same successful formula has worked in all the major arenas around the country and abroad with audiences of 12,000 or more enjoying perhaps for the first time the thrill of hearing a programme of classical music. A major tour of German and Swiss arenas took place in the Autumn of 2005 with performances in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Zurich and other important towns and cities. The 2006 schedule includes performances in Rotterdam, Vienna, Stuttgart, Munich and Leipzig and in Australia, Melbourne and Sydney. The 200th performance at the Royal Albert Hall takes place in November.

In December 1991 Raymond Gubbay presented the Royal Opera production of Turandot at Wembley Arena which proved a huge success. More recently he has successfully co-presented in-the-round opera and ballet productions at the Royal Albert Hall including La Boheme (directed by Francesca Zambello), Carmen, Madam Butterfly, Tosca, and Aida (all directed by David Freeman), Cavalleria Rusticana, Pagliacci and with English National Ballet, Swan Lake, Romeo And Juliet and The Sleeping Beauty. In June 2006, Raymond Gubbay will be presenting a brand new in-the-round production of Showboat directed by Francesca Zambello at the Royal Albert Hall.

In the West End, his productions include: The Ratepayers Iolanthe and The Metropolitan Mikado, Ute Lemper in seasons at the Queens Theatre and the Savoy Theatre, Circus Oz and Bejart Ballet at Sadlers Wells, the Bolshoi Ballet at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in several seasons of Gilbert and Sullivan at the Savoy Theatre and Peter Pan, The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville at the Savoy. At the Royal Festival Hall he has presented seasons of Peter Pan, A Christmas Carol, Stanislavsky Ballet. Follies, On Your Toes and Circus Oz.

The annual Raymond Gubbay Christmas Festival features over one hundred and eighty performances in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow and major towns and cities throughout the UK.

He has been the subject of major profiles and interviews in virtually every national newspaper, has broadcast and been interviewed frequently on both radio and television. His tongue in cheek application to run the Royal Opera House in 2000 was greeted with scorn by the musical establishment but received remarkable heavyweight support in the press and elsewhere.

Raymond Gubbay is an Honorary Fellow of both the Royal Academy of Music and Trinity College of Music, London and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He was awarded a CBE in June 2001. He lives in London and France.