Alpesh Chauhan OBE was born in Birmingham and studied cello under Eduardo Vassallo, at the Royal Northern College of Music, in Manchester, before pursuing the prestigious Master’s Conducting Course. He has studied with Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and as Assistant Conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, from 2014 to 2016, was mentored by Andris Nelsons and Edward Gardner. Following his outstanding début in 2015, he was appointed Principal Conductor of Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini, in Parma, and performed much of the great symphonic repertoire, including a complete cycle of Brahms’s symphonies. Other current posts include Principal Guest Conductor of the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker, Associate Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and Music Director of Birmingham Opera Company. He appears as guest conductor with the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre national d’Île de France, Orchestre national de Lille, Orchestra dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Malmö Symfoniorkester, and Seattle Symphony, among others, and enjoys collaborations with soloists such as Nicola Benedetti, Karen Cargill, Colin Currie, Veronika Eberle, James Ehnes, Pablo Ferrández, Ilya Gringolts, Benjamin Grosvenor, Hilary Hahn, Stephen Hough, Pavel Kolesnikov, Johannes Moser, Beatrice Rana, and Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider. A keen advocate of music education for young people, he is a patron of Awards for Young Musicians, a UK charity supporting musically talented young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. He has worked with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland and the symphony orchestras of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Royal Northern College of Music, and was the conductor of the 2015 BBC Ten Pieces film which brought the world of classical music into secondary schools across the UK and received a BAFTA award. Following the success of the 2019 production by Birmingham Opera Company of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District he was declared Newcomer of the Year in the 2021 International Opera Awards. In 2022 Alpesh Chauhan was named ‘Miglior Direttore’ by the Italian National Association of Music Critics for concerts given across Italy in 2021, and in January 2022 received an OBE for Services to the Arts in the Queen’s New Year Honours.