PHOTOGRAPHY: NADJA SJÖSTRÖM
It’s four years now since the charismatic young Californian Ryan Bancroft won First Prize in the Malko Competition for young conductors in Copenhagen with a performance of Poul Ruders’s Sarabande Blues. The audience, too, was won over by his joyful, expansive conducting – informed by influences from ballet to Ghanaian music and dance – and the way he communicated with such fluidity and grace while the orchestra responded to his every gesture, however fleeting or extravagant.
That success in April 2018 brought him to the attention of top agencies, and the bookings followed. After stepping in as a last-minute conductor with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in November 2018, returning in May 2019, the 30-year-old Bancroft was offered the post of principal conductor from December 2019. Thereafter the Tapiola Sinfonietta, a chamber orchestra with a reputation for cutting-edge programming, invited him to be artist-in-association from 2021; and after a couple of well-received concerts with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra (RSPO), in December last year he was announced as their chief conductor designate from the 2023-24 season. ‘We struck gold – he’s a unique talent!’ said RSPO executive and artistic director Stefan Forsberg. ‘There is a fabulous chemistry and truly sparkling energy between Ryan and the orchestra.’ Bancroft’s first engagement after the announcement was to conduct the prestigious Nobel Prize Concert, and the orchestra applauded his performance as enthusiastically as the elite audience (see interview, p35).
This summer, Bancroft brings the BBC National Orchestra of Wales to the BBC Proms for two concerts which, he hopes, will be a lot less complicated than his Proms debut in 2020. That was broadcast live from the Hoddinott Hall in Cardiff – the first time the orchestra had played together in six months. ‘It was unbelievably tense to have to play such a huge concert with just a selection of musicians spread across the stage,’ he says. ‘We all had to listen to each other like chamber players, and I had to learn how to conduct again!’
He is ‘super-excited’ therefore to be bringing the full BBC NOW to London on 3 and 8 August. The first date he calls ‘traditional but with a bit of a twist’ – Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony are prefaced by Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte, originally wr
