Scott Ellaway, Artistic Director
Rated by BBC Music Magazine as one of the UK’s Top Ten emerging talents, Welsh-born conductor Scott Ellaway has established a career as an innovative and entrepreneurial music director. A scholar and graduate of the University of Oxford, Ellaway has studied with some of the world's leading pedagogues, including Claudio Abbado, Michael Tilson Thomas, Vernon Handley, and Jorma Panula, and is establishing himself as an educator of future musical generations through his pioneering educational work.
Ellaway made his professional debut at the age of twenty-one with members of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Welsh National Opera while still an undergraduate at Oxford. He has since worked with orchestras and ensembles internationally and in the UK, including the Philharmonia Orchestra, where he became the youngest British-born conductor to lead the orchestra since Sir Simon Rattle, the Academy of Ancient Music, Berliner Symphoniker, London Mozart Players, the Heidelberger Frühling Festival Orchestra at the invitation of Matthias Pintscher, and the London Symphony Orchestra, with whom he made his debut at Henry Wood Hall in 2016 and continues to collaborate. He has also appeared at Lincoln Center in New York and works with opera companies including Lyric Opera of Chicago.
Ellaway has collaborated with a number of internationally renowned artists, including the BBC Singers, Iestyn Davies, Gautier Capuçon, Lisa Milne, Alexander Melnikov, Andrew Staples, Louise Winter, Jonathan Lemalu, James Bowman, and Nicola Benedetti, whose performance at the Cheltenham Festival was broadcast on BBC Radio 3. He is active in international media, contributing to outlets including Classic FM and Deutsche Welle TV, with broadcast work supported by CBS.
Orchestra Europa swooned and swerved under the direction of Scott Ellaway.
— Geoff Brown, The Times
In the summer of 2006 Ellaway, working with composer Robert Saxton and other members of the University of Oxford, founded Orchestra Europa, a unique educational charity devoted to fostering enthusiasm for classical music, with an orchestral emphasis, among young people of all ages. Using high-profile concerts with artists of distinction as its focal points, Orchestra Europa grew rapidly under Ellaway's leadership into a substantial organisation benefiting several hundred young people each year and working with a variety of schools, community groups, and other artistic organisations. His pioneering work has been met with international acclaim in publications including BBC Music Magazine, Gramophone Magazine, Music Teacher Magazine, The Times, and The Daily Telegraph, positioning Ellaway as both a successful conductor and an inspiration to the next generation of musicians.
Ellaway maintains an active guest conducting schedule alongside his commitment to Orchestra Europa and the American Orchestra Europa Foundation, and is the founder of OpusYou, a global music education platform.
