One of Britain’s leading millennial conductors and orchestral trainers, John Wilson possesses a meticulous attention to detail and an ability to inspire orchestras, resulting in performances of zest and character yet also of polished and tight ensemble. His love for film music—which first inspired him to study music—has, to an extent, informed his repertoire, although he has also extensively recorded concert works by Copland, Richard Rodney Bennett, Korngold, and Dutilleux. Born in 1972 in Gateshead, UK, he showed a talent for conducting from a young age, founding his own John Wilson Orchestra in 1994 while a student at London’s Royal College of Music. He first appeared in the late 1990s as a keen scholar and idiomatic advocate for film scores—being hired by MGM to reconstruct the original orchestrations of their major musicals, including Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and An American in Paris—and British light and popular classics. He assisted Bennett with the scoring of the BBC TV film series Gormenghast (1999), and he later embarked on recording a complete edition of Bennett’s orchestral works (started in 2017), having previously started a similar complete edition of Copland (in 2015). In 2018, he revived the Sinfonia of London, an orchestra originally formed by leading players to record film scores, and made an award-winning recording of Korngold’s Symphony (rec. 2019).