Justin Brown, Conductor

Justin Brown

Conductor

Justin Brown is an English born conductor and performer who has become the Alabama Symphony Orchestra’s Music Director Laureate after six seasons performing with them.  He is also recognized as the General Music Director of the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe in Germany.  In his youth, Brown studied at Cambridge University and Tanglewood, becoming both an assistant and mentee to names such as Seiji Ozawa and Leonard Bernstein.  In Bernstein’s production Mass, Brown made his debut performance as conductor.  Brown’s career grew rapidly as he showcased as a guest conductor for symphonies in many areas of the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, and parts of Asia and Oceania.

            Brown has conducted and performed a range of music during his career, including works created by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Gershwin, and many others.  In 2007, he was nominated for a Grammy for Best Classical Recording for Peter Lieberson’s The Six Realms and has also received the award of Editor’s Choice from Gramophone Magazine for Gershwin’s complete music for Piano and Orchestra along with Anne-Marie McDermott and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.  During his six seasons with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, he and the orchestra received first-place American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers awards in 2010 and 2012, and, in 2011, the John S. Edwards Award for Strongest Commitment to New American Music.

            In the foreseeable future Brown is scheduled to perform, for the second complete time, Ring Cycle at Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, and later conduct contemporary works by Thomas Adès, Jonny Greenwood, and Alfred Schnittke.