Visiting Artists 2010
Meyrick Alexander ARCM
Meyrick Alexander first heard Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring when he was seven years old; on the strength of this he decided to learn the bassoon and attended one of Archie Camden’s lecture recitals where he was advised to begin when he reached eleven. He duly received his first bassoon lesson on his eleventh birthday, won a Music Scholarship to Clifton College, progressed to the National Youth Orchestra and was awarded a Scholarship to the Royal College of Music where he studied with Geoffrey Gambold.
Meyrick Alexander joined the Royal Ballet Orchestra in 1971, moving to the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra as Second Bassoon two years later where he formed the Aquilo Wind Quintet. He then spent a year in his first principal position with the Northern Sinfonia before being appointed to his present position as Principal Bassoon of the Philharmonia Orchestra at the end of 1980, aged twenty-eight.
Since then he has appeared as soloist many times, including performances of the Mozart Bassoon Concerto with Ashkenazy at the Swansea Festival and at the Royal Festival Hall with Sinopoli, with whom he has recorded Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for Deutsche Grammaphon with Philharmonia colleagues. He has also recorded this work with the London Chamber Orchestra, performed it at La Scala, Milan, and is featured on their Vivaldi disc in the B flat Bassoon Concerto RV502.
Meyrick Alexander is committed to new music: he gave the first British performance of Michael Daugherty’s Dead Elvis, in costume, premiered his Concerto for Four Bassoons Hell’s Angels, commissioned by the Philharmonia, and is the dedicatee of Guy Woolfenden’s Bassoon Concerto written in 2000.
Meyrick Alexander also plays period instruments in the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and is a member of the Classical Wind Quintet. He is in demand as a guest artist and has played with nearly every British symphony and chamber orchestra, the Nash, Albion and Capricorn ensembles, London Winds and the London Sinfonietta. He has been Professor of Bassoon at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama since 1984 and regularly gives masterclasses and recitals at all the other major colleges of music in Britain.
Richard Simpson
Richard Simpson hails from Yorkshire. After four years study at The Royal College of Music studying with the late Sydney Sutcliffe, he was appointed to the position of sub-principal oboe with the BBC Symphony Orchestra - a position he held for just one year, before being invited to join the Halle Orchestra as Principal Oboe. He spent eighteen years with that orchestra and during that time had the opportunity of performing concerti by Mozart, Strauss, Vaughan Williams, Martinu and Hummel with them. He was also a very active chamber musician in the North-West, performing many solo recitals and visiting festivals both in this country and abroad.
In 1991 he returned to the BBC Symphony Orchestra, this time as Principal Oboe. He has recorded for the BBC the Sinfonia Concertantes of both Haydn and Mozart and appeared as soloist in a live BBC broadcast of Vaughan Williams’ Oboe Concerto. He is again involved in various chamber music activities connected with the orchestra, and with his wife, Janet, is a member of the Syrinx Trio, with Michael Cox, Principal Flute of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
He is a professor at the Guildhall School of Music and is in much demand for masterclasses and coaching at the other London Colleges.
Amongst other recordings, he has recorded CDs of Thomas Pitfield's music, and more recently recordings of Benjamin Britten’s Six Metamorphoses after Ovid and the Sonata for Oboe and Piano by Edmund Rubbra.
