Jonathan Freeman-Attwood

Freeman-Attwood was born in Woking, Surrey, on 4 November 1961, the son of Major Harold Warren Freeman-Attwood and Marigold Diana Sneyd Freeman-Attwood (née Philips).[14][15]

He attended first St Peter's School, Seaford, and from 1975 to 1980 Milton Abbey School.[16] He read for a BMus (Hons) in Music at the University of Toronto, where he was awarded the Healey Willan Scholarship, and graduated with First Class Honours before embarking on research at Christ Church, Oxford (MPhil).

He served as Vice-Principal & Director of Studies at the Royal Academy of Music from 1995 to 2008 under his predecessor, Sir Curtis Price. This followed a period as Dean of Undergraduate Studies between 1991 and 1995, when he was responsible for launching the first Bachelor of Music performance degree in the sector, with King's College London, and under the aegis of the Centre for Advanced Performance Studies (CAPS).[17]

Holding senior posts at the Academy for over 30 years, Freeman-Attwood has played a leading role in launching new programmes,[18] major international relationships – nurturing a twenty-year collaboration[19][20][21] with the Academy's sister conservatoire in the US, The Juilliard School – including three Promenade concerts, commercial recordings and a co-commission of Sir Peter Maxwell's Kommilitonen!. Among his other professional development initiatives is the founding in 1997 of the Academy recording label (now with fifty titles, all of which he produced, including a major association with Linn Records from 2012) to introduce talented young artists to the creative challenges of the studio. He has also assembled a roster of international musicians as permanent staff or visiting professors. Under his leadership the Royal Academy of Music consistently leads international league-tables for university ranking.[22]

A close involvement in the artistic strategy of the Academy has led to the inauguration of successful community-concert series, amongst others 'Free on Fridays', '400+' and, with the Kohn Foundation, a 10-year project to perform all of Bach's sacred and secular cantatas, which extended into a new series of Bach the European: from Ancient Cosmos to Enlightenment and Bach in Leipzig, the latter of which surveys the first cycle of cantatas Bach wrote in 1723-4.

Under his Principalship, the Academy has gained Degree-Awarding Powers from the Privy Council (2012), and has recently embarked on a number of significant capital projects, including two new practice facilities and, from 2015, a major theatre and recital hall project, the Susie Sainsbury Theatre and Angela Burgess Recital Hall, which was completed in early 2018.[23] The Academy raised £28m in order to bring this project to fruition, its most significant capital achievement to date.

When Freeman-Attwood began his Principalship in 2008, the annual fundraising total had just crossed the £1m threshold. After averaging £1.5m per year until 2016, the total raised in the academic year 2021/2022 had climbed to £18m. The Royal Academy of Music’s Future, the Bicentenary Campaign, launched in April 2022, aimed to raise £60m to advance the Academy’s most pressing priorities. As of February 2023, the Campaign had raised £54m which is contributing to the costs of state-of-the-art-facilities, attracting and retaining the best teachers and collaborators, widening access to music education and providing essential financial support for students. During this period five endowed Chairs were created, amongst the only such funded positions at any conservatoire globally.

In celebration of the Bicentenary, Freeman-Attwood commissioned the Academy’s 200 PIECES series which launched in December 2022 [24]. 200 composers, including Brett Dean, Helen Grime, Eleanor Alberga, Sir George Benjamin, and Hans Abrahamsen, were invited to write 200 new works for solo instruments or voice. All 34 principal-study instruments taught at the Academy are represented in the collection and all works were premiered by current students and subsequently recorded for easy access for anyone to download worldwide.

Freeman-Attwood devised, with Sir Elton John, the Sir Elton John Global Exchange Programme. This scheme facilitates student exchanges and musical projects by bringing together twelve leading conservatoires from across the world, including Paris, Vienna, Helsinki, Juilliard and Shanghai.

In 1990, Freeman-Attwood married Henrietta Paula Christian Parham; they have two children.

Jonathan Freeman-Attwood has produced over 250 commercial discs for many of the world's most prestigious independent labels including Naxos, BIS, Chandos, Hyperion, Harmonia Mundi USA, Channel Classics, Pentatone, and AVIE. His productions have won major awards, including several Diapasons d’Or, eight Gramophone awards and numerous nominations over the last twenty years with artists such as Rachel Podger (including the BBC Music Magazine Recording of Year 2023 [25]), The Cardinall's Musick, Trevor Pinnock, Oliver Knussen, Phantasm, I Fagiolini, La Nuova Musica, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Daniel-Ben Pienaar, and various leading cathedral choirs, including St Paul's Cathedral and Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. He produced Gramophone's ‘Record of the Year’ in 2010 – the final volume of William Byrd's complete Latin Church Music for Hyperion.[26]

As a trumpet soloist, Freeman-Attwood has released thirteen solo albums, the majority with Linn Records,[27] and has attracted wide critical acclaim for their musical originality and effective 're-imagining' of the trumpet as a chamber instrument in reconstructions of works from c.1600 to the 20th Century.[28][29][30] Initially with John Wallace and Colm Carey in 2003 he recorded The Trumpets that Time Forgot (Rheinberger and Elgar) before conceiving a series of programmes with pianist Daniel-Ben Pienaar: La Trompette Retrouvée (2007), Trumpet Masque (2008), Romantic Trumpet Sonatas (2010), A Bach Notebook for Trumpet (2012) and The Neoclassical Trumpet (2014), An English Sett for Trumpet (2017). Trumpet Masque won High Fidelity's Recording of the Year in 2009.

He also recorded the world première of Gabriel Fauré's Vocalises in 2013, accompanied by pianist-scholar Roy Howat whose edition was published by Peters. Freeman-Attwood acts as Series Editor for Resonata Music,[31] including ‘The Re-Imagined Trumpet’ in which, amongst other pieces from his catalogue, newly configured sonatas by Schumann, Mendelssohn and Fauré have been published. In 2014 he recorded the Godfather Theme for Sony as part of the anniversary celebrations of the classic films. In 2020, he published with composer Thomas Oehler a Sonata ‘after Richard Strauss’ for Boosey and Hawkes, recorded for Linn, with Chiyan Wong as part of The Viennese Trumpet.[32] This follows an edition of Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite with collaborator Daniel-Ben Pienaar.[33]

In 2021 he released a recording of four Classical-style sonatas ‘by’ and ‘after’ Mozart, created by Mozart scholar Professor Timothy Jones, drawing on varied styles and periods in Mozart’s music as well as torsos and sketches.[34] In 2024 Freeman-Attwood will release the tenth trumpet and piano disc, a programme of Handel’s concertos, as part of his ongoing solo series for Linn Records.

As educator and scholar he continues to be active as a lecturer, critic, and contributor to journals (Gramophone since 1992) and books, including The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd edition, 2001), Cambridge University Press's Companion of Recorded Music (2009), and to BBC Radio 3, for which he is a regular contributor to Building a Library. He is an established authority on Bach interpretation, particularly as it challenges and refocuses historical perspectives on performance practices,[35] and has written essays regularly for EMI, Warner, Deutsche Grammophon, Universal, and other major record labels. He discussed his career and views on the changing world of music education at length in an interview with Final Note Magazine in 2015 [36] and in January 2023 he wrote for The Arts Desk, advocating for conservatoires prioritising making recordings.[37]

In 2021 he co-edited a volume, Musical Architects, to celebrate the new spaces designed by Ian Ritchie Architects at the Royal Academy of Music, and also the Academy's Bicentenary in 2022.[38]

In 2023 the volume Musically Speaking will be published, a collection of interviews with significant musical figures. Conducted between 2009 and 2018, Freeman-Attwood’s ‘Principal’s Interviews’ will include extended exchanges with, amongst others, Dame Janet Baker, Sir Colin Davis, Semyon Bychkov, Christoph von Dohnányi, [39] and.[40] The volume will also feature an extended essay on the symphonies of Anton Bruckner,[41] based on an interview with Christian Thielemann after his recently completed recordings with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for Sony Music.