Born in Gateshead and since 2011 a Fellow of the Royal College of Music where he studied composition and conducting, John Wilson is now in demand at the highest level across the globe and has over the past 30 years conducted many of the world’s finest orchestras.

In 2018 he relaunched Sinfonia of London, which The Arts Desk described as ‘the most exciting thing currently happening on the British orchestral scene’. His much-anticipated BBC Proms début with this orchestra, in 2021, was praised by The Guardian as ‘truly outstanding’ and admired by The Times for its ‘revelatory music-making’. They are now highly sought-after across the UK, the 2023/24 season notable for returns to the BBC Proms, Aldeburgh Festival, and London’s Barbican Centre, among other festivals and venues.

Their large and varied discography having received near universal critical acclaim, in the Autumn of 2023 they released their 17th album since 2019. Their CDs have earned several awards, including, for three successive years, the BBC Music Magazine Award in the Orchestral category: for recordings of Korngold’s Symphony in F sharp (2020), Respighi’s Roman Trilogy (2021), and Dutilleux’s Le Loup (2022). The Observer described the Respighi recording as ‘Massive, audacious and vividly played’ and The Times declared it one of the three ‘truly outstanding accounts of this trilogy’ of all time, alongside those by Toscanini (1949) and Muti (1984).

In March 2019, John Wilson was awarded the prestigious Distinguished Musician Award of the Incorporated Society of Musicians for his services to music and in 2021 was appointed Henry Wood Chair of Conducting at the Royal Academy of Music.