Biography
Job title: Senior Lecturer: Classical Music
Courses taught: BA (Hons) Music (Classical)
Specialisms: chamber music
Mark Smith graduated from the Royal College of Music in 1986 gaining his DipRCM and winning the Douglas Moore Horn Prize. He has pursued a diverse career as an orchestral musician, chamber musician, educator, soloist, conductor and researcher. Mark has appeared as Principal Horn with a long list of orchestras in the UK and abroad (Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Britten Sinfonia, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Scottish Opera, Manchester Camarata, Vlaams Radio Symphony, Flanders Symphony Orchestra, Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Orchestra India and more….) In 1998 he moved to Denmark to take up the position of Solo Horn of the internationally-regarded chamber music ensemble Esbjerg Ensemble, remaining there until 2004 when he spent a year as Solo Horn of Denmark’s National Radio Symphony Orchestra before returning to the UK. With Esbjerg Ensemble, Mark travelled widely making chamber-music concerts, master-classes, radio broadcasts, CD recordings and solo performances as far afield as Beijing University and the University of California, Santa Barbra. Mark has appeared with Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt and in 2012, he played the solo horn part in the world premiere of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht for Birmingham Opera. As part of an ongoing project to bring rarely-performed masterpieces to a wider audience, this year saw the successful premiere of Mark’s chamber scoring of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony at the Swaledale Festival, with Mahler’s Tenth Symphony currently in preparation. Mark is often to be seen working with the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing a bewildering array of blowable instruments, from French Horn, Natural Horn, Baroque Horn, Alp Horn, to Luur, Buccina, conch-shells and animal horns.
