Peter Ash

Born in Iowa in 1961 and studied at the Interlochen Arts Academy, Michigan, before moving to London in 1979 to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and then at King's College.

Ash has a wide and eclectic range of opera repertoire, which ranges from Purcell, (Dido and Aeneas, The Fairy Queen) and Haydn (Orlando Paladino, L'anima del filosofo, Il mondo della luna, La vera costanza) to contemporary operas by Berio and Henze. World premieres include Tobias Picker's Fantastic Mr. Fox presented by the Los Angeles Opera in 1998-99.

Ash has worked with many orchestras including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia, London Mozart Players, London Sinfonietta, Bournemouth Sinfonietta, Scottish Opera, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Nieuw Belgisch Kammerorkest, Oriol Ensemble and Kammerphilharmonie Berlin. He has made recordings for the BBC, RTE, Spanish National Radio, SFB German Radio and a television concert with Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam in Holland.

Festival appearances include world premieres in Salzburg with the Scharoun Ensemble, Mozart's Requiem in Istanbul, the opening concert of the 1991 Mozart Bicentenary Festival in Prague, and Handel's Belshazzar in Spain. At the Covent Garden Festival he conducted A Midsummer Night's Dream, Curlew River and The King and I. In St. Petersburg, Russia his varied repertoire has ranged from Mozart and Beethoven to Britten and Tippett, and included the premiere of The Minpins, his own arrangement of orchestral music by Sibelius. He has also conducted performances of Debussy's opera La Chute de la Maison Usher (London South Bank, Lisbon), and Sibelius' The Maiden in the Tower (Barbican Sibelius Festival).

Ash is committed to broadening the boundaries of orchestral music. He is Artistic Director of the London Schools' Symphony Orchestra, and is Music Advisor to the Roald Dahl Foundation, for whom he has conducted many important premieres. These include Georgs Pelecis' Jack and the Beanstalk in 1996 - with Danny DeVito, Simon Callow, Joanna Lumley and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and Tobias Picker's Fantastic Mr. Fox, with Gerald Finley in a production at the Los Angeles Opera directed by Donald Sturrock and designed by Gerald Scarfe. His recording with the Taliesin Orchestra of Eleanor Alberga's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, also with DeVito and Lumley, will be released later this year.

As composer and arranger, Ash has written for television and theatre, including The Art of Singing (1997), and An Awfully Big Adventure, (1998). His theatre work includes incidental music for a new production of Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine in Magdeburg (1999), and several arrangements. He is also working on a new dance score for two pianos and percussion and a new children's opera commissioned by the Los Angeles Childrens Chorus.