Martyn Brabbins

John Francis
John Francis
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Published 2023-10-03
The Ralph Vaughan Williams Society 'Guest of the Month' interviewee for October 2023 is conductor Martyn Brabbins.

Martyn Brabbins is Music Director of English National Opera. Apart from his many commitments in the opera house, Martyn guests with top international orchestras such as the Royal Concertgebouw, San Francisco Symphony, DSO Berlin and Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, as well as the Philharmonia, BBC Symphony and most of the other leading UK orchestras. He is a popular figure at the BBC Proms, which in 2019 commissioned fourteen living composers to write a birthday tribute to him.

Known for his advocacy of British composers, one of Martyn’s crowning achievements is the complete recorded cycle of the Vaughan Williams symphonies on the Hyperion label. Of one release, Gramophone magazine’s editor decided that ‘Brabbins’s Vaughan Williams symphony cycle continues to go from strength to strength with this impressively cogent, self-effacing reading…scrupulously attentive, uncommonly humane, utterly free of artifice and, to my mind, deserving of a place alongside Barbirolli, Boult, Previn, Handley and Haitink.’

Our video recording is topped and tailed with film of Martyn conducting the Tredegar Town Band for Albion Records (part of The Ralph Vaughan Williams Society) in an arrangement of Vaughan Williams’s Prelude on Rhosymedre, for our acclaimed recording Vaughan Williams on Brass - rvwsociety.com/vaughan-williams-on-brass/
All Comments (7)
  • @TimG1
    I, too, really liked the interview!
  • @peterwilliams8283
    What an illuminating interview. Thank you Andrew, and Martyn. To group the three symphonies that followed No 3, the Pastoral together gave me a lot to ponder. With few composers do I find a 'Generosity of Spirit' embedded in their music, but it is so with VW. So nice to hear from Martyn the reaction of audiences in Brazil, China and Japan. VW has accompanied me on my journey through life since I first discovered (care of Mr James, my music teacher at Hinchley Wood School) the Tallis Fantasia. I owe a huge debt to both.
  • @elgar104
    Martyn used to conduct me in Bristol.... and a superb maestro he was, to! Clear. Very musical. No ego.
  • @uingaeoc3905
    Thank goodness a Brtish conductor with international respect is promoting RVW abroad.