Benjamin Wallfisch

Benjamin Wallfisch has received commissions from organisations including the BBC, Bath International Festival of Music (for three consecutive seasons), Orchestre de Bretagne, Chelmsford Festival, Coull Quartet, English Chamber Orchestra, Halle Orchestra, Lake District Summer Music, Leamington Festival, Manchester Camerata, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Park Lane Group, Royal College of Art and the Warwick Arts Society.  In 2003 he was commissioned by the Rambert Dance Company to compose a 21-minute ballet score for a new piece by award-winning choreographer Rafael Bonachela.  Rambert gave the London Premiere at Sadler’s Wells to great critical acclaim and later featured the work in their UK tour 2003/04.  2006 saw Benjamin’s BBC Proms debut conducting the world premiere of Escape Velocity, the third work composed under his tenure as Associate Composer of the Orchestra of St. John’s, a position which now includes at least two new orchestral commissions a year.  Benjamin Wallfisch’s first feature film score Dear Wendy (by the legendary Danish director/writer team Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier) was nominated as “Discovery of the Year” in the 2005 World Soundtrack Awards and “Best Original Score” in the 2006 Danish Film Academy Awards.

Associate Conductor of the English Chamber Orchestra since 2002, in the UK Benjamin has conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia and London Symphony Chorus and has performed in venues such as the Barbican, Royal Festival Hall, and St. George’s Bristol.  Of his recent recording of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto with Ruth Palmer and the Philharmonia (QTZ2045), Robert Matthew-Walker of International Record Review said “If I hear a greater record of Shostakovich’s music this year, I shall be astonished”.  He was assistant to Valery Gergiev in the Netherlands Premiere of Rimsky Korsakov’s opera/ballet Mlada and was immediately invited to work with him again in performances of major works by Tchaikovsky and Debussy.  Benjamin recently made his Australian debut conducting the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in a series of live broadcast Gala performances at the Sydney Opera House and has also conducted the Bavarian Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre de Bretagne, Hamburg Symphony and Ulster Orchestra.  Benjamin has collaborated with some of the world’s finest soloists including Evelyn Glennie, Dame Felicity Lott, Branford Marsalis, Igor Oistrach and Jean-Yves Thibaudet and has been acclaimed by The Strad as “one of the finest accompanists anywhere on the podium”.

Born in London in 1979, Benjamin was awarded the Master of Music degree with Distinction in composition from the Royal Academy of Music and is the first composer in the Academy’s history to be awarded the coveted honorary DipRAM.  Whilst at the Academy, Benjamin was the recipient of every major composition prize including the Theodore Holland Intercollegiate Prize and the Performing Right Society Foundation Scholarship.  He graduated from the Joint Course of the Royal Northern College of Music and the University of Manchester with First Class Honours and his teachers have included Anthony Gilbert, Michael Finnissy, Robert Saxton and Jeffery Wilson.

For more information visit www.benjaminwallfisch.com