Salomon's 60th Birthday Concert

The Return!

Photo Credit: Ben Ealovega / Uri Elkayam

We’re very pleased to announce that our long-delayed 60th Anniversary concert will take place at St John’s Smith Square on June 1. We are delighted that both Martyn Brabbins and Michal Oren will be returning to conduct: they, like us, were very disappointed that we had to cancel last October’s concert and are looking forward to celebrating the Salomon Orchestra’s sixty years of music-making with us.

A long-standing friend of the orchestra, Martyn has been Salomon’s President since 2002. For the 60th Anniversary concert, he has written a new fanfare - A Birthday Greeting - which will be conducted by our new friend, the prize-winning young conductor Michal Oren.

Michal will follow the fanfare with Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

After the interval, Martyn will conduct Elgar’s First Symphony.

This is a very special concert for us, and we hope friends old and new will come and celebrate it with us. Booking is already open - there is a link to St John’s booking page on our website here.

We’ll post more details here about the concert and the programme in the run-up to the concert - so please subscribe.

Martyn Brabbins

Martyn Brabbins is the former Music Director of the English National Opera (2016-2023). An inspirational force in British music, Brabbins has had a busy opera career since his early days at the Kirov and more recently at La Scala, the Bayerische Staatsoper, and regularly in Lyon, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Antwerp. He guests with top international orchestras such as the Royal Concertgebouw, San Francisco Symphony, DSO Berlin and Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony, as well as the Philharmonia, BBC Symphony and most of the other leading UK orchestras.

He is a popular figure at the BBC Proms, who in 2019 commissioned fourteen living composers to write a birthday tribute to him. Known for his advocacy of British composers, he has conducted hundreds of world premieres across the globe. He has recorded nearly one hundred and fifty CDs to date, including prize-winning discs of operas by Korngold, Birtwistle and Harvey. In 2023, he received the RPS Conductor Award for his "colossal" contribution to UK musical life.

He was Associate Principal Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 1994 - 2005, Principal Guest Conductor of the Royal Flemish Philharmonic 2009 - 2015, Chief Conductor of the Nagoya Philharmonic 2012-2016, and Artistic Director of the Cheltenham International Festival of Music 2005-2007. He is Prince Consort Professor of Conducting at the Royal College of Music, Visiting Professor at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire and Artistic Advisor to the Huddersfield Choral Society alongside his duties at ENO, and has for many years supported professional, student and amateur music-making at the highest level in the UK.

Martyn Brabbins is represented by Intermusica.

Michal Oren

Michal Oren is an award-winning conductor from Tel Aviv, Israel. Michal's work represents a contemporary modern approach aiming to combine classical music with additional arts as a new step in the 21st century's cultural creation. Michal is currently studying for her Master of Performance in conducting, with a full scholarship, at the Royal College of Music in London under the conductors Toby Purser, Peter Stark and Howard Williams. She was awarded a distinction for her Bachelor of Music in orchestral conducting from the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music at Tel Aviv University.

In 2020, Michal won the first prize in the conducting competition of the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music and, in September 2023, won first prize in the 4th International Academy and Competition of Orchestra Conducting in Estoril, Portugal. Michal is a Victor and Lilian Hochhauser Scholar, Residence Music Scholar of The Robert Anderson Trust, and since 2015, Scholar of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. Michal is the founder and musical curator of the “Museum Orchestra” of Petach-Tikva Museum of Art in Israel.