Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
As the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) celebrates its 75th Anniversary in 2021, its mission to enrich lives through orchestral experiences that are uncompromising in their excellence and inclusive in their appeal, places the RPO at the forefront of music-making in the UK. Performing approximately 200 concerts each season and with a worldwide audience of more than half-a-million people, the Orchestra embraces a broad repertoire that enables it to reach the most diverse audience of any British symphony orchestra. Whilst artistic integrity remains paramount, the RPO is unafraid to push boundaries and is equally at home recording video game, film and television soundtracks and working with pop stars, as it is performing the great symphonic repertoire.

The RPO collaborates with the most inspiring artists and is thrilled to welcome its new Music Director, Vasily Petrenko. His appointment stands as a major landmark in the Orchestra’s history and together they will pursue a strategy to broaden the audience for orchestral music while enhancing the RPO's reputation as one of the world’s most versatile and in demand ensembles. Vasily Petrenko joins a roster of titled conductors that includes Pinchas Zukerman (Principal Guest Conductor), Alexander Shelley (Principal Associate Conductor) and Grzegorz Nowak (Permanent Associate Conductor).

The RPO aims to place orchestral music at the heart of contemporary society, collaborating with creative partners to foster a deeper engagement with communities to ensure that live orchestral music is accessible to as inclusive and diverse an audience as possible. To achieve this, in 1993 the Orchestra launched RPO Resound, which has grown to become the most innovative and respected orchestral community and education programme in the UK and internationally. The programme delivers bespoke, pioneering education, community and talent development projects to a wide range of participant groups, including homeless people, children, young people and stroke survivors, always with the overarching objective to leave a lasting legacy.

Simon Dobson
is an award winning composer, conductor, multi-instrumentalist, and producer.

His work as principal conductor and arranger with the London based Parallax Orchestra has seen him conduct critically acclaimed sell out shows with rock and metal bands at the prestigious Royal Albert Hall, and his studio and arranging work with the same outfit has lead to him working on many albums featured in the UK top 40, including the recent album ‘AMO’ by Bring Me The Horizon which reached UK no.1 in January 2019. Simon also undertakes conducting duties with the Southbank Sinfonia and the Heritage Orchestra.

Simon works extensively as an orchestral arranger and alongside writing (and often performing) brass and strings for almost 40 records to date, Simon regularly writes for London’s Heritage Orchestra and Amsterdam’s famous Metropole Orkest.

Simon began his career as a composer, and after studying with a scholarship at the Royal College of Music in London, Simon has worked to commission for the last fifteen years. His arrangements have been featured at the Proms. His works for wind and brass have been performed countless times around the world, earning him three British Composer Awards (BASCAs), most recently in 2018 for his work The Turing Test. Simon continues to push boundaries within the Brass and Wind scene writing classical contemporary music and concertos that challenge players and audiences alike around the globe.

As a performer Simon regularly tours the UK as a live session musician and his own project, Badcore Horns, has recently been signed to Brighton based DeepCake records. Simon has performed on over 50 albums and endorses JP trumpets and Aston Microphones. Simon was the most recent recipient of the PRS Composers Fund, and has received funding to make his second solo album of compositions which will be out towards the end of 2019.

Mike Oldfield
has been among the most inventive and successful musicians in popular music for the best part of two decades. A dozen of his albums have reached the UK chart, and despite not being regarded as a singles artist, he has been responsible for a US Top 10 single and three UK Top 5 hits. Two of his albums have topped the UK chart, and one of the two was the second biggest selling album of the decade during the 1970's. In 1981, he was awarded the Freedom Of The City of London, an accolade which he shared at the time with only one other popular recording artist, Paul McCartney, while John Cleese appeared in ads for his records. At one point in the late 1980's, he was contacted by Michael Jackson with the idea of collaborations, but probably blew his chances by refusing to believe that the person on the other end of the telephone was really Jackson.

Born in Reading on May 15 1953, Mike Oldfield was shown his first guitar chords by his father, a doctor, who had learned the basics of the instrument in Egypt during a spell as a forces medic. The young Oldfield's teenage musical influences included Celtic music, classical (especially Bartok, Sibelius and Ravel), primitive tribal music (Which does not mean today's flavour of the month, World Music), hard Rock (Led Zeppelin II), Blues (We used to support Free and I was very impressed with Paul Kossoff) and Folk Music (I used to practice guitar by copying note-for-note the instrumentals played by Bert Jansch and John Renburn).

With his sister Sally, Oldfield formed a duo known as The Sallyangie, who made an album for Transatlantic, Children Of The Sun in 1968, when he was still only 15 years old. When brother and sister went their separate ways, the 16 year old Oldfield formed a band which he called Barefoot, another member of which was his brother, Terry Oldfield, now a successful maker of music for natural history documentaries for television. Barefoot were not destined for either fame or longevity, and after they folded in 1970, Oldfield became bass player and sometimes lead guitarist for a critically lauded group, The Whole World.

Led by Kevin Ayers (ex-Soft Machine), this group was a quintet, every member of which would achieve subsequent fame or notoriety: apart from Oldfield (who became its most celebrated ex-member), it included drummer Robert Wyatt, who went on to chart success despite being confined to a wheelchair after a tragic accident, David Bedford on keyboards, who worked for several years with Oldfield before branching out on his own, Ayers himself, who remains a cult hero, on bass and vocals, and inventively unorthodox saxophonist Lol Coxhill, who has been known to busk at Waterloo Station when he feels like it. Oldfield notes that he regards the time he spent playing bass with Wyatt at the drums, as having been important and enjoyable. During this period, Oldfield worked on two albums by Ayers, Shooting At The Moon, which was released in 1971, and the oddly-titled Whatevershebringswesing (1973).

Still only in his late teens, Oldfield became a victim of the Rock'N'Roll lifestyle, admitting that he developed bad habits while still in his teens from the pressure of touring. Two years later, Oldfield and Wyatt were among the members of the backing band for a concert which was critically regarded as a super session. A recording of the event was released as an album titled June 1st 1974, and featured Ayers, John Cale and Nico (both ex-Velvet Underground) and Brian Eno, who had left Roxy Music not long ago. By that date, of course, Oldfield was himself well on the road towards solo superstardom.

During his time with The Whole World, Oldfield enjoyed recording at Abbey Road studios so much that he would arrive earlier than his colleagues in order to experiment with different instruments and learn about different recording techniques. This became such an interest that he borrowed a tape recorder from Kevin Ayers to work on a instrumental composition which had resulted from his research. Eventually, he felt sufficiently confident about the quality of the as yet incomplete work to want to preview it to record companies in the hope that he could raise enough interest and more importantly, finance, to polish it to his own satisfaction. One of the labels he tried was Virgin, at that time a company whose main business involved a chain of successful retail record shops. Richard Branson, was thinking about launching a record label, but at the time Branson's inhouse producer, Tom Newman, heard Oldfield's demos, plans were not sufficiently advanced to commit the still fledgling label to a major album project, as it might still be many months before the Virgin label achieved liftoff. Thus Tom regretfully advised Oldfield that while they were incredible impressed with the demos, he felt it only fair that the project should be offered to other labels who might be in a better position to progress in immediately.

Oldfield accepted the advice, and over several months of 1973, played his tape to a number of labels, none of whom offered to sign him. At which point, he returned to Virgin, where ha had received positive approval, in the hope that the situation might have improved. Branson was surprised that no-one had been interested and signed Oldfield , allowing him to utilise the facilities at The Manor, the Oxfordshire farmhouse which had been transformed into Virgin's first recording studio, if they were not being used by customers. In order to facilitate this arrangement, Oldfield lived at The Manor for some time, and after six months working with Tom Newman, was finally satisfied with his creation, an extended piece lasting just under 52 minutes which had involved overdubbing numerous instruments, the vast majority of which he played himself. The result could only possibly appear as a complete album.

This was Tubular Bells, the first record released on the Virgin label which became the best selling album of 1974, eventually topped the UK album chart more than a year after it was released, and was only outsold during the 1970's by Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Trouble Water.

Tubular Bells remained in the UK album chart for over five years and reached the US Top 3 during a chart residence of nearly a year. Success in America was assisted by the selection of a part of Tubular Bells as the theme music for the headline grabbing horror movie, The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin (a film which, remarkably, Oldfield did not see until many years later). In the wake of this cinematic success, a single was released in the US of Theme From The Exorcist, which reached the Billboard Top 10 in 1974, and doubtless fuelled the album's climb to platinum status and eventual sales to date of well over ten million copies worldwide. Not bad for a debut album with only one track, which had been written and largely played by a virtual unknown. The best known name of the record was that of Viv Stanshall, erstwhile leader of The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, who played the role of Master Of Ceremonies, introducing the instruments as they took up the theme of the composition. ...