Simon Phillippo

Biography

Simon Phillippo studied at the Royal Academy of Music and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he received a PhD in 2000. His piano studies were undertaken with Pamela Turnlund and Jeremy Brown, and he has performed and broadcast extensively throughout the UK and abroad, as a recitalist, concerto soloist, chamber musician and accompanist. A musician with broad and diverse interests, Simon studied conducting with Matthew Taylor, George Hurst and Sir Colin Davis, and was a prize-winning finalist in the Leeds Conductors Competition in 2009. He spent a year studying at the National Opera Studio in London, before joining the music staff of Welsh National Opera, where he worked for fourteen years as staff conductor, chorus master and repetiteur. For WNO Simon conducted over 150 opera performances, and was the chorus master for many WNO productions and recordings, including the first staging in the UK of Handel’s Jephtha and the world premiere of James MacMillan’s The Sacrifice. Other opera conducting engagements have included Madam Butterfly and Tosca with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall; Don Giovanni, Carmen, The Barber of Seville, Tosca and La Cenerentola as Music Director of Opera Brava; and La traviata in the Middle and Far East with Opera and Concert Productions Worldwide. He has also worked with English National Opera, Opera Europa, Opera Holland Park and the European Chamber Opera. In the concert hall he has led the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the WNO Orchestra, the Orchestra of Opera North, Brandon Hill Chamber Orchestra, Mozart Festival Orchestra, Ernest Read Symphony Orchestra, and the Helios Orchestra, of which he was Artistic Director and Principal Conductor. Simon has published widely on a range of musical subjects; he has also given talks on BBC Radio 3, and has presented lectures on opera for Welsh National Opera, Liverpool Hope University and Rose Bruford College. He has been an Associate Lecturer at Cardiff University, and is a leading authority on the British composer Robert Simpson, contributing three chapters to a major symposium published in 2013.

Research Interest

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