Born in London, Peter Selwyn studied at the Mannheim/Heidelberg Hochschule für Musik before going to St. John’s College, Cambridge to read Modern Languages. He then studied piano at London 's Royal Academy of Music and, later, conducting with David Parry.
Peter Selwyn has a wide range of experience in the top opera houses of Britain and Germany. At the Bayreuth Festival,he worked for three seasons as assistant to Adam Fischer and Giuseppe Sinopoli on the centenary Ring Cycle. From 1999 to 2005 he worked as Kapellmeister and Head of Music at the Staatstheater Nuremberg. He began his career on the music staff of English National Opera before moving to the Royal Opera, where he assisted and played for many of the world’s great singers and conductors, including Placido Domingo, Kiri te Kanawa, Valerij Gergiev and Sir Georg Solti, and where he continues to work as a guest, most recently assisting Carlo Rizzi on Il Trovatore.
Peter has a repertoire of over fifty operas as conductor and of over fifty more as assistant and repetiteur; in Nuremberg he conducted among others Carmen, Peter Grimes, Orfeo ed Euridice, Iphigénie en Tauride, Hänsel und Gretel, Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, La bohème, Rigoletto and La traviata, as well as allthe major Mozart operas. For the Stadttheater Fürth he conductedA Little Night Music. In the UK he has conducted Fidelio, Roméo et Juliette (Opera North), Carmen (Welsh National Opera), Hänsel und Gretel (Opera Holland Park), Jenufa and La Cenerentola (English Touring Opera) and Treemonisha (Pegasus Opera). For the European Opera Centre he conducted the first performances in Hungary of The Rape of Lucretia. He has also conducted numerous world premières, including Hear Our Voice by Jonathan Dove in London, Nuremberg and at the Prague State Opera; operas by Alec Roth, David Knotts and Todd Macneal for English National Opera’s Baylis Programme in London and Australia; for Blackheath Halls Opera, The Uninvited by Julian Grant and for London Children’s Ballet, Jane Eyre by Julia Gomelskaya.
Peter Selwyn has also a large and varied symphonic repertoire and has worked with many orchestras and ensembles in Europe and the UK including the City of London Sinfonia, the Endymion Ensemble, the Nürnberger Philharmoniker, the Orchestras of Opera North and Welsh National Opera, the Orchestra dell’ Teatro Comunale di Bologna, the Southbank Sinfoniaand the Wiener Symphoniker. He is regular guest conductor of the Symphonieorchester der Hochschule für Musik Nürnberg and has made a series of recordings with the Composers´ Ensemble.
Peter Selwyn has worked as assistant conductor at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, English National Opera and Glyndebourne; at European opera houses including Hamburg, Oslo and Strasbourg; at the Aldeburgh and Bregenz Festivals, and on opera projects with the BBCSO at the Proms and with the CBSO, working with conductors such as Sir Richard Armstrong, Frederic Chaslin, Paul Daniel, Sir Andrew Davis, Sir Mark Elder and Günter Neuhold. In Nuremberg, he assisted GMD Philippe Auguin on productions including Fidelio, Pelléas et Mélisande, Salome, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg und Der Ring des Nibelungen. He has also workedas repetiteur for Almeida Opera, Music Theatre Wales, Scottish Opera and at the Batignano Festival in Italy. He has worked as music director on a number of projects for Opera Genesis at ROH, for the National Opera Studio, for the ENO Studio and Baylis Programme, including Street Scene at Brixton Prison and The Fairy Queen at the Banqueting House.
He is co-founder and Artistic Director of the Internationales Kammermusik Festival Nürnberg, for whom he has conducted The Rape of Lucretia, which was broadcast by Bayerischer Rundfunk, Noye’s Fludde, The Turn of the Screw, das babylonexperiment (Matthew King), Dido and Aeneas, The Soldier’s Tale, and, most recently, the premiere ofSchau nicht zurück, Orfeo by Stefan Hakenberg, in a co-production with the Internationale Gluck Festspiele.He is also a Professor at London’s Royal College of Music.
Recent and future engagements include performances of Fidelio with Opera North, Owen Wingrave in Nuremberg, a return to Opera Holland Park with La rondine, Salome at the Singapore Lyric Opera and Der Kaiser von Atlantis with English Touring Opera.
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