Robert Max
Robert Max enjoys a colourful career as conductor, cellist and chamber musician. He regularly conducts the Covent Garden Chamber Orchestra in Covent Garden, at the St. Jude's Proms and in the Rye Festival. Since 2000 Robert has been invited each year to conduct the Arad Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir in western Romania including concerts broadcast on Television and in May 2004 he also conducted the Oradea Philharmonic Orchestra.
In 2001 he made the first of three annual visits to Tambov in Russia to conduct, give recitals and direct a week-long chamber-music academy. As a mark of gratitude for his work the Rachmaninov Institute awarded him the title of Honorary Professor.
He has conducted the Symphony Orchestra at Junior Guildhall and he currently conducts the Symphony and String Orchestras at Royal Holloway, University of London.
In December 2004 Robert made his debut as soloist and conductor of the Kazakh State Symphony Orchestra in Almaty. He has worked with many distinguished soloists including Ralph Kirshbaum, Gyorgy Pauk, Erich Gruenberg, James Kirby, Richard Lester, Aled Jones, Roger Chase, David Pyatt, Tim Hugh and Nicolai Demidenko. Robert was Musical Director of the Nonesuch Orchestra and the Zemel Choir (the UK's leading mixed-voice Jewish Choir) from 1994-8, with whom he recorded two CDs for Olympia and toured Israel in 1996.
Robert's career as a solo cellist has taken him all over the UK, to the USA, Germany, Denmark, Holland, France, Austria, Russia and Romania, where he has given recitals with his wife, the pianist Zoë Solomon, and performed concertos with conductors including Howard Shelley, Sir Alexander Gibson, Sir James Loughran and Owain Arwell Hughes. He features on a CD of music by Margaret Hubicki released by Chandos in June 2005.
As cellist of the Barbican Piano Trio for eighteen years, Robert has performed on four continents, recorded for ASV, Black Box, Dutton and Guildmusic, performed live on the BBC World Service and Radio 3 and on TV and Radio in Europe and the USA. The Trio was invited to give a Beethoven Trio Cycle in the Wigmore Hall's Master Concert Series in 1995, which they repeated in a dozen other parts of the UK. Two CDs of music by Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky and Schnittke were released in 2001 with a further CD of chamber music by Sergei Taneyev to be released this year on the Dutton label.
The London Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra have invited Robert to work as guest principal cello on several occasions and Robert has also visited Denmark to play guest principal cello in the Copenhagen Philharmonic. He is currently the Principal cellist of the London Chamber Orchestra. Robert was Musical Director of Pro Corda, the National School for Young Chamber Music Players from 1998 to 2000 and now coaches chamber-music at MusicWorks. He was one of two English Semi-finalists in the 2002 Donatella Flick Conducting Competition. In June 2002 Robert made his debut with the BBC Concert Orchestra conducting them in works by Mendelssohn, Elgar and Dvorak and playing/directing concertos by Haydn and Vivaldi.