One of Great Britain’s leading and most versatile conducting talents, Martyn Brabbins was Associate Principal Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra from 1994 to 2005 and Artistic Director of the Cheltenham International Festival of Music from 2005 to 2007. Following studies in London and with Ilya Musin in Leningrad, he won first prize at the 1988 Leeds Competition. Since then he has conducted most of the major symphony orchestras in the UK, and appears every season with the Philharmonia Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and at the BBC Proms. Known particularly for his performances of the music of Elgar, Britten and Walton, he also has a strong affinity for the great nineteenth-century romantics and for the Russian and French repertoire, and he is one of Europe’s leading interpreters of contemporary music. Equally at home in the opera house, he has conducted productions at the English National Opera, Opera North, Mariinsky Theatre, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Hamburgische Staatsoper, Oper Frankfurt, Opéra national de Montpellier and The Netherlands Opera. Martyn Brabbins has made more than sixty recordings, including, for Chandos, discs of music by Bax, Edgar Bainton, Hubert Clifford, Edward Gregson and Cyril Scott.