John Wilson born in Gateshead, County Durham in 1972 is a British conductor, arranger and musicologist and specialises in music for the small and big screens, as well as Big Band jazz and light music. He is renowned as the creator of the John Wilson Orchestra.
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He attended Breckenbeds Junior High School in Low Fell, then Heathfield Senior High School. Other pupils of this school included footballers Steve Stone and Paul Gascoigne along with Tracey Whitwell (actress). In the late 1980s he studied music at A level at Newcastle College, where he conducted a variety of ensembles including a 96 piece orchestra and choir for a concert version of West Side Story. John wrote and directed his own pantomime during this period and he also conducted for many local amateur dramatic societies. Later he studied composition and conducting at the Royal College of Music, and during this time won the Tagore Gold Medal for outstanding academic excellence.
In addition to conducting a number of British-based orchestras, Wilson is also an arranger and orchestrator and has produced a number of orchestrations for film, radio and television. In 2000 he orchestrated Sir Richard Rodney Bennett's incidental music for a BBC production of Gormenghast. This scoring won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Film Score. Wilson orchestrated and conducted Howard Goodall's score for the 2002 BBC film The Gathering Storm about the life of Winston Churchill.
Wilson's interest in historical film scores has led to his restoring a number of classic film scores and he is currently reconstructing the orchestrations of all the major MGM musicals, especially those by Conrad Salinger.[1] In 2004 Wilson was appointed the music director for the Hollywood feature film Beyond the Sea, a biopic of the life of Bobby Darin starring Kevin Spacey. In 2007 he conducted a BBC Proms concert of British film music, followed in 2009 by a celebration of MGM Musicals, and made a further appearance in the 2010 Proms celebrating Rodgers and Hammerstein.[2]. He made a further Proms appearance in the 2011 season, entitled "Hooray for Hollywood", featuring his orchestra with the Maida Vale Singers and soloists.
He was recently appointed a patron of The British Art Music Series [3] along with James MacMillan and Libby Purves.
Wilson made his operatic debut conducting a series of performances of Ruddigore for Opera North in early 2010.[4]