Richard Stamp
the Academy of London’s founder and Artistic Director, was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1943. He was encouraged to take up conducting professionally by Sir Georg Solti who heard him conduct at Cambridge University. Stamp studied in London with Sir Colin Davis and in Vienna at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts with Hans Swarowsky and the composer Friedrich Neumann.

On returning from Austria Richard Stamp became assistant conductor of the Royal Ballet, conducting more than sixty performances for the company. On leaving he was awarded a conducting fellowship by the Boston Symphony Orchestra to go to Tanglewood. In the later ‘70s Stamp was active in music education on both sides of the Atlantic, working with the orchestras of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, the Chicago Civic Orchestra (training orchestra of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) and, finally, for two years the Resident Conductor of the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Founding the Academy of London in 1980, Stamp’s subsequent work, and in particular his recordings for ASV and Virgin Classics, received a wide international recognition. This included the Vierteljahrliste of the Preis der Deutsches Schallplatttenkritik, outstanding reviews in the United States and France, three stars and a rosette in the Penguin Record Guide, and Strauss’s Metamorphosen selected as ‘Collector’s Choice’ in CD Record Review’s ‘Building a Library’ on BBC Radio 3. In addition to the Academy of London, Stamp has worked with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Northern Sinfonia, and with orchestras in France, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, the USA, China and Canada (recording with the Toronto Chamber Orchestra for RCA Red Seal). In the choral field Stamp has conducted several of Austria’s leading choirs, including the Vienna Singverein, the Arnold Schoenberg Chor and the Vienna Boys’ Choir, and for his services to Austrian music was awarded in 1996 the Grosses Ehrenzeichen des Landes Kärnten and Austria’s millennium medal, the Östarrichi-Taler.

The Academy of London
includes some of Europe’s leading instrumentalists, several of whom enjoy solo careers in their own right. In its London season the orchestra under its founder Richard Stamp has appeared with a list of soloists that includes Yehudi Menuhin, Lynn Harrell, Jose van Dam, Grace Bumbry, Jack Brymer, Gervase de Peyer, Dimitri Sitkovetsky, Burt Bacharach, Nigel Kennedy, Earl Wild, Charles Rosen, Tatiana Troyanos, Arleen Auger, Ray Still, Richard Stoltzman, Joseph Silverstein, and Jean-Yves Thibaudet (in his UK concerto debut.) The orchestra commissioned several significant new works including ‘Sappho—Lyrical Fragments’ by John Tavener, and among their many appearances abroad they were the first British orchestra to tour China with the British Council on a direct invitation from the Chinese government.

The orchestra enjoyed particularly close relationships with the United States and Austria. The ‘American Artists’ Series’ was hailed in Washington as ‘America’s musical embassy in Europe’. UK debuts were given to prizewinners in collaboration with seven American competitions including the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition and the Metropolitan Opera Auditions, appearing alongside a succession of America’s leading stars. UK first performances included works by John Adams, Stephen Montague, Jacob Druckmann, Donald Erb and Wallingford Riegger, and the European premiere of Samuel Barber’s last major orchestral work ‘The Lovers’ for baritone chorus and orchestra, of which the Times wrote “It would be hard to imagine a more assured first performance”.

From the mid–1980s until the Millennium the Academy of London, in association with the Anglo-Austrian Music Society, presented the largest orchestral series ever mounted in Britain involving Austrian soloists and choirs. This included concerto debuts by five principals of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, among them the Concertmaster Rainer Kuchl, appearances by Gundula Janowitz, Christa Ludwig, and Paul Badura Skoda, and nine separate concerts with the Vienna Boys’ Choir, eight under their conductor Peter Marschik with whom they also recorded Handel’s Messiah for the Capriccio label, and the ninth under Richard Stamp, their first British guest conductor. On the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s death the Arnold Schoenberg Chor made their UK debut performing the Mozart Requiem under Stamp in Westminster Abbey, and in 1995 Stamp and the Academy in collaboration with the Foreign Office performed the Brahms German Requiem in Villach in Carinthia, with the A Cappella Villach and Choir of Gurk Cathedral, to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. The following year the same choirs came to London to celebrate Austria’s Millennium, and in 1997 Stamp brought the legendary Vienna Singverein to London for the Schubert 200th anniversary, on their first visit for more than twenty years when they sang under Herbert von Karajan. On three occasions Stamp and the orchestra collaborated with the Vienna Volksoper, presenting gala concerts at the Barbican featuring ‘Stars of the Vienna Volksoper’. The last of these was a concert in celebration of the centenary of Johann Strauss, and was the first time in history that all thirteen of the his operettas were represented on a single evening.

Royal Northern Sinfonia, Orchestra of Sage Gateshead
is the UK’s only full-time chamber orchestra and the leading professional orchestra in the North East. Since its inception in 1958, it has built a distinctive reputation as a fresh-thinking and versatile orchestra, performing with a trademark zest and stylistic virtuosity. It is the only UK orchestra to have a purpose-built home for all its rehearsals, concerts and recordings, with acoustics rated by Lorin Maazel as ‘in the top five best halls in the world’.

Playing a wide repertoire of thrilling, diverse orchestral music, RNS works regularly with a roster of globally renowned artists from all genres. In recent years, these have included Sir Mark Elder, Pierre Laurent-Aimard, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Ian Bostridge, as well as leading popular voices such as Sting, The Pet Shop Boys and Efterklang. The orchestra also contributes to the continuing re-invention of orchestral repertoire with regular commissions and premieres, most recently from Benedict Mason and David Lang, John Casken and Kathryn Tickell.

Open in its approach and broad in its reach, Royal Northern Sinfonia engages audiences and communities throughout its own region as well as further afield, with residencies at festivals from Aldeburgh to Hong Kong, as well as regularly featuring in the BBC Proms and neighbouring Edinburgh Festival. Back home at Sage Gateshead, Royal Northern Sinfonia works with adults of all ages and young people, through the Young Musicians programme and In Harmony project both of which provide unbeatable instrumental learning opportunities.

In September 2014, Royal Northern Sinfonia welcomed Lars Vogt as Music Director Designate, taking up the Music Director post from September 2015. Lars Vogt is an artist whose virtuosity and commitment to communicating the deepest values of orchestral music knows no bounds. He follows in the foot-steps of Conductor Laureate, Thomas Zehetmair, whose twelve-year tenure had a profound impact on the orchestra’s style, with his maxim always to perform 'as if the ink was still wet on the page'.