Guest Conductor
Nicholas McGegan is loved by audiences and orchestras for performances that match authority with enthusiasm, scholarship with joy, and curatorial responsibility with evangelical exuberance. London's Independent calls him "one of the finest baroque conductors of his generation" and The New Yorker lauds him as "an expert in 18th-century style."
Through nearly 25 years as its music director, Mr. McGegan has established the San Francisco-based Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO) as the leading period performance band in the United States – and at the forefront of the "historical" movement worldwide thanks to appearances at Carnegie Hall, the London Proms, and the International Handel Festival, Gottingen, where he has been artistic director since 1991.
Mr. McGegan has been a pioneer in the process of exporting historically informed practice beyond the small world of period instruments to the wider one of conventional symphonic forces, guest-conducting orchestras such as the Concertgebouw, Suisse Romande, the Halle, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Toronto, and Sydney symphonies, and the New York, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong philharmonics, as well as opera companies including Covent Garden, San Francisco, Santa Fe, and Washington.
Born in England, Mr. McGegan was educated at Cambridge and Oxford. He was recently made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) "for services to music overseas." Other awards include the Halle Handel Prize, an honorary professorship at Gottingen University, and an official Nicholas McGegan Day, declared by the mayor of San Francisco in recognition of two decades' distinguished work with the PBO.