British conductor Alpesh Chauhan is the Principal Guest Conductor of the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker and Music Director of the Birmingham Opera Company. His debut album features orchestral works by Tchaikovsky including Francesca da Rimini, The Voyevoda, and The Tempest, and was released with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra on Chandos Records in June 2023. 

Recent and forthcoming highlights include performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Seattle and Houston symphonies, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Hallé, the Atlanta, National, Melbourne, and Antwerp symphony orchestras, the Symphony Orchestra of India, the London Symphony and Philharmonic orchestras, the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI, the BBC Symphony and Philharmonic orchestras, the Orchestre National de Lille, and the Malmö Symphony Orchestra, alongside many symphonic projects with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker. 

Alpesh enjoys collaborations with distinguished soloists such as Nicola Benedetti, Karen Cargill, Colin Currie, Veronika Eberle, James Ehnes, Pablo Ferrández, Alban Gerhardt, Ilya Gringolts, Benjamin Grosvenor, Hilary Hahn, Sir Stephen Hough, Leila Josefowicz, Pavel Kolesnikov, Johannes Moser, Beatrice Rana, and Arcadi Volodos. 

Following his outstanding debut in 2015, he was appointed Principal Conductor of the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini in Parma and performed and recorded much of the great symphonic repertoire, including a complete cycle of Brahms’s symphonies. Alongside the recently critically acclaimed RhineGold, other notable opera titles include Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, West Side Story, and a production of Turandot at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia. 

A keen advocate of music education for young people, Chauhan is a patron of Awards for Young Musicians, a UK charity supporting talented young people from disadvantaged backgrounds on their musical journeys. He has also worked with ensembles such as the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland and the symphony orchestras of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Royal Northern College of Music. He 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 distinguished BAFTA award. 

Born in Birmingham, Chauhan studied cello with Eduardo Vassallo at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester before continuing at the RNCM to pursue the prestigious Master’s Conducting Course. Chauhan studied with Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and was mentored by Andris Nelsons and Edward Gardner in his post as Assistant Conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra from 2014 to 2016. Chauhan was named “Newcomer of the Year” in the 2021 International Opera Awards and in 2022 he was delighted to receive the Conductor Award from the Italian National Association of Music Critics for “Miglior Direttore” for concerts across Italy in 2021. 

Chauhan was honored to receive an OBE in HRH The Queen’s New Year’s Honours in January 2022 for Services to the Arts. 

Hailed by Gramophone Magazine as “one of the finest among the astonishing gallery of young virtuoso cellists”, German-Canadian cellist Johannes Moser has performed with the world’s leading orchestras such as the Berliner Philharmoniker, the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the BBC Philharmonic at the Proms, the London Symphony, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, the Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, the Tokyo NHK Symphony, and the Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras with conductors of the highest level including Riccardo Muti, Lorin Maazel, Mariss Jansons, Valery Gergiev, Zubin Mehta, Vladimir Jurowski, Franz Welser- Möst, Christian Thielemann, Pierre Boulez, Paavo Jarvi, Semyon Bychkov, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Gustavo Dudamel. 

His recordings include the concertos by Dvořák, Lalo, Elgar, Lutosławski, Dutilleux, and Tchaikovsky, which have gained him the prestigious Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik and the Diapason d’Or and Gramophone commented “[Lutosławski and Dutilleux Cello Concertos]…Anyone coming afresh to these masterly works… should now investigate this new release ahead of all others…”. 

A dedicated chamber musician, Moser has performed with Emanuel Ax, Joshua Bell, Jonathan Biss, James Ehnes, Vadim Gluzman, Leonidas Kavakos, Midori, Menahem Pressler, Andrej Korobeinikov, Gloria Campaner, and Yevgeny Sudbin. Moser is also a regular at festivals including the Verbier, Schleswig-Holstein, Gstaad, and Kissinger festivals, the Mehta Chamber Music Festival, and the Colorado, Seattle, and Brevard music festivals. 

Renowned for his efforts to expand the reach of the classical genre, as well as his passionate focus on new music, Moser has recently been heavily involved in commissioning works by Julia Wolfe, Ellen Reid, Thomas Agerfeld Olesen, Johannes Kalitzke, Jelena Firsowa, and Andrew Norman. In 2011 he premiered Magnetar for electric cello by Enrico Chapela with the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, and in the following season he continued this relationship with the orchestra performing Michel van der Aa’s cello concerto Up-close. Throughout his career, Moser has been committed to reaching out to all audiences, from kindergarten to college and beyond. He combines most of his concert engagements with masterclasses, school visits and preconcert lectures. Moser holds a professorship at the prestigious Cologne Hochschule fuer Musik und Tanz. 

Born into a musical family in 1979, Moser began studying the cello at the age of eight and became a student of Professor David Geringas in 1997. He was the top prize winner at the 2002 Tchaikovsky Competition and was awarded the Special Prize for his interpretation of the Rococo Variations. In 2014 he was awarded the prestigious Brahms prize. 

A voracious reader of everything from Kafka to Collins, and an avid outdoorsman, Moser is a keen hiker and mountain biker in what little spare time he has. 

Moser plays on an Andrea Guarneri Cello from 1694 from a private collection.