Joseph Horovitz

Joseph Horovitz was born in Vienna in 1926 and emigrated to England in 1938. He studied music at New College, Oxford, with Gordon Jacob at the Royal College of Music where he won the Farrar Prize, and for a further year with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. The Festival of Britain in 1951 brought him to London as conductor of ballet and concerts at the Festival Amphitheatre. He then held positions as conductor to the Ballets Russes, associate director of the Intimate Opera Company, on the music staff at Glyndebourne, and as guest composer at the Tanglewood Festival, USA. His compositions number twelve ballets, nine concertos, two one-act operas, chamber music, works for brass and wind bands, film, television and radio, and choral works - most famously Captain Noah and His Floating Zoo. Since 1961 he taught at the Royal College of Music, where he became a Fellow in 1981. He won two Ivor Novello Awards and in 1996 he was awarded the Gold Order of Merit of the City of Vienna, and in 2007 the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art First Class. The Worshipful Company of Musicians awarded him the Cobbett Medal in 2008 for services to chamber music. In 2017 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music of the Royal College of Music, London.