Ryan Wigglesworth has established himself as one of the foremost composer-conductors of his generation. He was Principal Guest Conductor of the Hallé Orchestra from 2015 to 2018 and Composer in Residence at English National Opera. He held the Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellowship with the Cleveland Orchestra for the two seasons 2013/15 and 14/15 and was Composer-in-Residence at the 2018 Grafenegg Festival. In close partnership with the Royal Academy of Music, he recently founded the Knussen Chamber Orchestra which makes its Aldeburgh Festival and Proms debuts in summer 2019.

Recent opera engagements include a new production of Die Zauberflöte in the 2019 Glyndebourne Festival Opera season (also to be performed at the 2019 Proms), Birtwistle’s The Minotaur for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Cosí fan tutte, Carmen and Glanert’s Caligula for ENO, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Aldeburgh, and widely acclaimed performances of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s The Silver Tassie with the BBC Symphony at the Barbican and Thomas Larcher’s The Hunting Gun at the 2019 Aldeburgh Festival.

 One of the leading composers of his day, his first opera, The Winter’s Tale, premiered at ENO in February 2017 in a production directed by Rory Kinnear and conducted by the composer. Other recent works include commissions from the Royal Concertgebouw and Cleveland orchestras, BBC Symphony (BBC Proms), song cycles for Sophie Bevan (Wigmore Hall/Grafenegg) and Mark Padmore (Aldeburgh Festival/Wigmore Hall). Further performances of his works have been directed by, amongst others, Sir Andrew Davis, Edward Gardner, Pablo Heras-Casado, Vladimir Jurowski, Oliver Knussen, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Franz Welser-Möst. Current projects include a piano concerto to be premiered at the 2019 Proms by Marc-André Hamelin, and a large-scale work for chorus and orchestra, co-commissioned by the Bergen Philharmonic and Hallé.

Born in Yorkshire, he studied at New College, Oxford and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Between 2007-9 he was a Lecturer at Cambridge University where he was also a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. In January 2019 he took up the position of Sir Richard Rodney Bennett Professor at the Royal Academy of Music.