Sheffield Symphony Orchestra
John Longstaff
Artistic Director
John Longstaff was born in Lancashire, read music at Girton College, Cambridge and studied conducting at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and also with George Hurst. He has held full time posts as rehearsal pianist and conductor at the Opera House in Kiel, Germany, and with Northern Ballet Theatre, in addition to guest engagements for Opera North, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and Opera Lirica.
As a composer and arranger he has been responsible for many ballet scores - in Kiel he composed the music for the full-length ballet Dorian (after Oscar Wilde) and was commissioned to revise the original score of La Sylphide for the Theater der Stadt Koblenz, a score which was also produced in Lüneburg. He has made several reduced orchestrations for Northern Ballet Theatre, including Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev), Swan Lake (Tchaikovsky), Don Quixote (Minkus), and Carmen (Bizet). His arrangement of music by Elgar for Great Expectations was recorded by NPC records, and was chosen by a critic in Gramophone magazine as his top recommendation of new CDs reviewed in the year 2000. Following the appointment of David Nixon as Artistic Director of Northern Ballet Theatre John has arranged the scores for the hugely successful ballet version of Madame Butterfly (Puccini), an entire evening of choreography to the music of Gershwin entitled I Got Rhythm, a selection of impressionist French music for Beauty and the Beast, and music by Mendelssohn and Brahms for a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream opening in September 2003.
In the realm of opera, he has made acclaimed chamber orchestrations of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin (for Clonter Opera), and of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel for an Opera North nationwide outreach project. He has also made piano reductions of works by Thea Musgrave, Param Vir, Gualtiero Dazzi and Aulis Sallinen for Novello's music publishers, and has prepared the performing material for several new works by Michael Nyman. Last year he edited Handel's oratorio Judas Maccabaeus in the orchestration attributed to Mozart which was recently discovered in Halifax and subsequently televised on BBC4.
He was appointed Musical Director of the Sheffield Symphony Orchestra in 1993, becoming Artistic Director in September 2001. This is his 12th season with the SSO.