Anthony McGill and Britten Sinfonia

Spanish conductor Pablo Urbina was born in 1988 and fundamental to his beliefs is that classical music can be used as a vehicle for social change. He won third prize at this year’s Siemens Hallé International Conductors Competition; since 2019 he has been Principal Conductor of London Orchestra Vitae. He is also an Ambassador of the Amber Trust UK, which provides classical music to children with visual impairments.

He has conducted leading orchestras, including the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Spanish National Radio Orchestra, the Hallé, Ulster Orchestra, City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong and Castilla y León Symphony Orchestra.

Outreach and education form a major strand of his activities and he has worked in outreach projects with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the BBC Proms, as well as giving masterclasses at Durham University and Baylor University in the USA. The promotion of new music and the revival of neglected repertoire is also important to him.

Pablo Urbina started studying French horn at the age of 8, before further studies at the Thornton School of Music in the USA and the Royal College of Music.

Clarinettist Anthony McGill enjoys a dynamic international solo and chamber music career and is Principal Clarinet of the New York Philharmonic – the first African-American principal player in the organisation’s history. He is the recipient of the 2020 Avery Fisher Prize, one of classical music’s most prestigious awards.

He appears as a soloist with top orchestras, including the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestras, the Metropolitan Opera and the Baltimore, Boston, Chicago and Detroit Symphony orchestras. He performed alongside Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma and Gabriela Montero at the inauguration of President Barack Obama, premiering a piece by John Williams.

As a chamber musician he has collaborated with the Brentano, Daedalus, Guarneri, JACK, Miró, Pacifica, Shanghai, Takács and Tokyo quartets, and performs with leading artists, including Emanuel Ax, Inon Barnatan, Gloria Chien, Yefim Bronfman, Gil Shaham, Midori, Mitsuko Uchida and Lang Lang.

He serves on the faculty of the Juilliard School and is the Artistic Director for its Music Advancement Program. He holds the William R and Hyunah Yu Brody Distinguished Chair at the Curtis Institute of Music.

In 2020 Anthony McGill’s #TakeTwoKnees campaign, protesting at the death of George Floyd and historic racial injustice, went viral. Earlier this year he partnered with Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative to organise a classical music industry convening at EJI’s Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, in which leaders and artists in classical music examined America’s history of racial inequality and how this legacy continues to impact their work.

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Earl Howard is a composer, performer and improviser on saxophones and electronics; for over 40 years he has presented his compositions in the United States and Europe at numerous venues, including Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall and Zankel Hall, The Kitchen, Donaueschingen Festival, Ars Electronica, Merkin Hall and the Whitney Museum. His method of creating orchestrated sounds with electronics and processing live improvisation creates unique, densely layered textures.

In 2011 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to compose Superstring for a large ensemble, featuring performers including Wu Wei, Miya Masaoka, Ernst Reijseger, Mark Dresser, Al Jaffe and Harris Eisenstadt, who premiered it at Roulette. He has also received three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships and, in 1998, Harvard’s Fromm Foundation Commission. This year the International Contemporary Ensemble has received a NYSCA commission for Earl Howard to compose a new work.

He has also produced soundtracks for film and video artists, including Nam June Paik, Mary Lucier, Rii Kanzaki, Bob Harris and Bill Brand. His compositions have been recorded by a number of musicians, including Anthony Davis’s recording of Particle W for piano and tape, released on Gramavision and Gerry Hemingway’s recording of D R for Solo Percussion on Auricle Records. His works can also be found on Erstwhile Records, Mutable Music, New World and Random Acoustics.

Earl Howard has collaborated with Anthony Davis since 1981 and has been the guest improviser and synthesist in Wakanda’s Dream, The Central Park Five and You Have the Right to Remain Silent (with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in 2020, the New York Philharmonic in 2021 and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2023).

Anthony Davis was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1951; he was Yale University’s first Lustman Fellow, teaching composition and Afro-American studies, returning to the institution as Visiting Professor of Music in 1990. In 1992 he went on to become Professor of Music in Afro-American Studies at Harvard University and subsequently became a full-time professor at the University of California at San Diego in 1998.

He made his Broadway debut in April 1993, composing the music for Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, following it up later the same year with the second part of Kushner’s play Perestroika on Broadway.

His opera X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X was the first of a new American genre: opera on a contemporary political subject; it is currently being performed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. It played to sold-out houses during its premiere run in 1986 and received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Classical Composition in 1993 following its release on the Gramavision label the previous year.

Anthony Davis’s second opera, Under the Double Moon (1989), was premiered at the Opera Theatre of St Louis; it’s a science fiction opera with an original libretto by Deborah Atherton. His third opera, Tania, based on the abduction of Patricia Hearst, was premiered at the American Music Theater Festival in 1992 and later released on Koch in 2001. A fourth opera was unveiled at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1997: titled Amistad and set to a libretto by poet Thulani Davis (the librettist of X) it explores the trial of slaves during a shipboard uprising.

Leroy Logan MBE is one of the UK’s most highly decorated and well-known Black police officers.

A respected and highly regarded commentator on policing and wider social justice issues, he believes that there is still much work to do in creating a more equitable and fair criminal justice system.

Leroy Logan’s early career was recently depicted in Red, White and Blue, the BAFTA- and Golden Globe-winning episode of director Sir Steve McQueen’s acclaimed television series, Small Axe.

After his retirement he published his autobiography, Closing Ranks: My Life as a Cop, and continues to draw on his decades of policing experience to give perceptive, critical analysis of the current UK justice system. He has appeared on Channel 4, Newsnight, Sky, BBC Radio 4, HARDTalk and in the Guardian, among many others.

As the founding member and past Chair of both the Met and National Black Police Association (BPA), he also co-founded Voyage Youth, a citizen’s focus of the BPA. A social justice charity, it aims to empower marginalised, young, Black people and provide them with the self-awareness and motivation to transform themselves and their communities.

In 2022 Leroy Logan was appointed Chair of Transition to Adulthood (T2A), the justice arm of the Barrow Cadbury Trust.