Andrew Powell is a composer, arranger, producer, conductor and musician who works across many different fields - from Classical to Rock to Film/TV and Theatre.
He was born in Surrey of Welsh parents and educated at King's College School, Wimbledon and King's College, Cambridge, where he received a Master's degree in Music.
He started composing at the age of 5, small pieces for piano and graduated to writing works for his school orchestra. Prior to going to Cambridge he attended composition classes with Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti at Darmstadt. Whilst at Cambridge he was a founder member, together with Roger Smalley and Tim Souster, of the live electronics group "Intermodulation," which gave first performances of several works by Stockhausen, as well as performing works by all of its members. He also founded, together with Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson, the progressive rock group "Henry Cow, " and performed with Nick Drake.
His first professional engagement after leaving Cambridge was as a soloist at the "Proms" at the Royal Albert Hall, London, playing Terry Riley's "Keyboard Studies". He subsequently worked with several orchestras, including CoventGarden with Colin Davis,LSO with Luciano Berio, LPO, BBC Welsh and, mainly, the BBC Symphony Orchestra with Pierre Boulez, and worked as a session player, as well as founding the group "Come to the Edge" with Robin Thompson and Morris Pert, which performed regularly with the Japanese percussion virtuoso Stomu Yamash'ta.
One of his first commissions as an arranger/conductor was the debut album of Cockney Rebel, including the songs Sebastian and Death Trip: he arranged their next two albums, and also albums for Leo Sayer (One Man Band,) Donovan, John Miles (Music, Rebel,) Cliff Richard (Miss You Nights,) Pilot (Magic, January,) Al Stewart (Modern Times, The Year of the Cat, Time Passages, Russians & Americans, Between The Wars,) Ambrosia, Mick Fleetwood, David Gilmour, Chris Rea, Nick Heyward, Vitamin Z, Peter Hoffman, Münchener Freiheit, The Hollies, Sammy Hagar, Classic Rock, Wouter van Belle, Laïs, Il Divo, Racoon, Adamo, Geike….
His career as a record producer took off when he was asked by David Gilmour of Pink Floyd (whose office had discovered her) to produce Kate Bush's first album The Kick Inside,whose first single Wuthering Heights went straight to No. 1 in the U.K., and many other countries worldwide,as did the album. He produced her next album Lionheart, and went on to produce records for artists as diverse
ANDREW POWELL
HERE WE GO AGAIN, RUBINOT
KRONCD088
COMPOSER'S WEBPAGE: www.andrewpowell.com
TITLES ON KRONOS RECORDS
as Chris de Burgh and Kansas, Elaine Paige and Judy Collins, Tim Rice and André Heller, John Miles and Berdien Stenberg & The Philharmonia Orchestra...
He worked on Tales of Mystery and Imagination, the first album by "The Alan Parsons Project" as arranger, conductor and co-composer: and on the band's subsequent multi-million selling records, including all of the albums released in the 1990s under the name "Alan Parsons".
His first experience of writing for film came when he was still at school - an electronic music score for his physics teacher's film "Gamma-Ray Absorption." He scored a couple of films for Royal College of Arts students whilst at Cambridge. He met the composer Stanley Myers when he was booked to play on some sessions for him, and went on to produce several of Stanley's film scoring sessions: this would occasionally result in a last minute phone call from Stanley asking him to write a lengthy chase scene… He learned a lot about scoring films from his work with, and friendship with, Stanley.
He wrote the scores for Ladyhawke (Michelle Pfeiffer, Matthew Broderick, Rutger Hauer, dir. Richard Donner ) which won an honours nomination for best score from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, Rocket Gibraltar (Burt Lancaster, Macauley Culkin, dir. Dan Petrie,) Closed Circuit (Film 4,) Here We Go Again, Rubinot!, and has contributed music to other films, such as Janice (Joseph Strick,) The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (Richard Dreyfuss, dir. Ted Kotcheff,) Caravan to Vaccares(Charlotte Rampling), Ice Dance, as well as to many T.V. programmes and series both in the U.K. and in Germany, France, Scandinavia and America.
He has co-written songs with Al Stewart, Alan Parsons, David Pack, Menna Elfyn, Stuart Elliott and Tim Rice.
He has conducted orchestras and ensembles all over the world, including the Philharmonia Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the LPO, the LCO, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Wellington Symphony Orchestra, the Bayerische Rundfunk Orchestra, the Münchener Kammeroper, the Wallace Collection, and the Black Dyke Mills and Grimethorpe Colliery Bands.
His catalogue of concert works stretches from works written in his Cambridge days for "Intermodulation" to more recent works for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, John Wallace and the Wallace Collection, Catrin Finch, Claire Jones, including several Arts Council commissions. His concert music has been performed in such varied locations as the Roundhouse London, St. David's Hall Cardiff, St. David's Cathedral St. David's, the Citè de la Musique Paris, The Duke's Hall London, the KKL Konzertsaal Lucerne, the Royal Albert Hall London, the Queen Elizabeth Hall London, King's College Chapel Cambridge, the University of Richmond Virginia, the Holywell Music Room Oxford, and the Sydney Opera House among others.
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