Geoffrey Simon  music director

Australian conductor Geoffrey Simon is resident in London and has appeared there with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, London Chamber Orchestra and English Chamber Orchestra.

Internationally, he has appeared with the American, Atlanta, City of Birmingham, Bournemouth, Fort Worth, Milwaukee, St Louis, Sapporo, Shanghai and Tokyo Metropolitan Symphonies, the Israel, Moscow, Munich and New Japan Philharmonics, The Residentie Orchestra of The Hague, the six major Australian orchestras and the Australian Opera.

His music directorships have included the Albany Symphony Orchestra (New York), the Sacramento Symphony (California) and the Orquestra Simfònica de Balears “Ciutat de Palma” (Mallorca). He has recently completed the Mahler cycle as Music Director of the Northwest Mahler Orchestra in Seattle. He is Artistic Director of the Swiss Global Artistic Foundation (London and Montreux) and a jury member for Young Concert Artists in Paris, Leipzig and New York.

Geoffrey Simon was a student of Herbert von Karajan, Rudolf Kempe, Hans Swarowsky and Igor Markevich, and a major prize-winner at the first John Player International Conductors’ Award. He has made over forty recordings for a number of labels, combining discoveries with familiar works by Tchaikovsky, Respighi, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Smetana, Bloch, Grainger, Debussy, Ravel, Saint-Saëns and Les Six. Amongst the contemporary composers he has recorded are Barry Conyngham, John Downey, Paul Patterson and Zhou Long.

For his own label, Cala Records, Geoffrey Simon has brought together large ensembles of single instruments—violins, violas, cellos, double basses, horns, trumpets and trombones—drawn from London’s leading solo and orchestral musicians. The recordings have attracted interest amongst instrumentalists worldwide.

A born conductor, whose every gesture expresses music.
Die Presse, Vienna

A gripping, wholly committed performance of Verklaerte Nacht that was the most dramatically intense it has been my pleasure to hear, a judgement not excluding Boulez, Barenboim and von Karajan. Superbly balanced and phrased throughout, Simon delivered the piece as a single, colossal arch of sound, blending sensitivity and ardour in a way that was overwhelming in its impact.
Classical Music, London