Music Director: Orlando Jopling
Credit: Karolina Kuras
Orlando Jopling has worked with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the English Chamber Orchestra, the London Mozart Players and the Irish Chamber Orchestra among many others, both on the concert platform and in the recording studio.
He was principal conductor and artistic advisor of the Royal Orchestral Society for ten years. He transformed their repertoire to include twentieth and 21st century composers, introduced soloists James Gilchrist, Tim Hugh, Benjamin Grosvenor and Boris Giltburg, and brought new collaborations, semi-staging Bluebeard’s Castle in Village Underground, Shoreditch with director Lila Palmer, a project with a Syrian Oud player, and Britten’s War Requiem in Cadogan Hall.
Orlando read music at Trinity College Cambridge where formative influences were the Wagner expert John Deathridge and Janáçek expert Paul Wingfield. He studied conducting at the Royal Academy of Music in London where the principal teachers were Colin Metters, George Hurst, Colin Davis and the great Russian guru Ilya Musin.
Chair: Jon Cooley
Jon Cooley is an amateur horn player who has been involved with numerous orchestras and ensembles across London and beyond for many years and was a co-founder of Harmony Sinfonia in Lewisham Borough in 2009. In the past ten years he has been involved with Fulham Opera, Saffron Opera and New Palace Opera and has a fathomless and unhealthy obsession with Wagner’s horn writing, though his musical interests are actually more diverse than this might indicate. In his previous life he was an NHS manager.