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Robert Hollingworth received his earliest musical education from his mother and as a chorister at Hereford Cathedral. He also studied
violin and keyboard, going on to read music at New College, Oxford University, recording and touring extensively with the choir and working with distinguished conductors and orchestras. He then spent a year on the post-graduate
Early Music Course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. At Oxford, encouraged by Edward Higginbottom and John Milsom, he founded the vocal ensemble I Fagiolini, and has since concentrated much of his musical life with this group. With them he has toured
worldwide from the UK Proms to both ends of Africa, the Far East and the USA, releasing recordings on Erato, Chandos and Metronome. In 2001 Robert Hollingworth directed Monteverdi's L'Orfeo
for Dutch company Opera Zuid. The highly innovative and atmospheric production was set in basement vaults, the audience following the singers and musicians from space to space. In 2003 he conducted the BBC Concert Orchestra and in 2004, with Henk Schut, created an innovative music-theatre piece for the Netherlands Chamber Choir called 'Faust', set in disued factories and a railway museum. He has also conducted the North German Radio Choir and the National Chamber Choir of Ireland.
Robert Hollingworth was conductor of the Leicester Bach Choir for four years, working on core baroque repertoire. He has directed Florilegium and The Bach Players (period instruments) in performances of Bach, Handel
and Monteverdi and The Brook Street Band on a number of staged projects, notably Handel's Acis and Galatea and Purcell's Indian Queen. In addition to his Lacock appearances, he is a regular guest
conductor at the Dartington International Summer School. He is increasingly involved in education work, both as a freelancer (projects funded by National Foundation for Youth Music) and I Fagiolini workshops. Robert
Hollingworth writes and presents for BBC Radio 3 and 2 on programmes such as Record Review, Music Restored and The Early Music Show. He founded and directed London's Visual and Dramatic Festival of Music, presenting amazing
programmes using light and space in the Gothic interior of Islington's Union Chapel. He has also worked on a number of films including Quills, where he utterly failed to make Joaquin Phoenix look like a real conductor. Since
2006 he has been one of the four artistic advisors to the York Early Music Festival. |
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