Kim Ashton

Composer – teacher – conductor – gardener – baroque oboist. Kim Ashton’s music has been heard in concerts and festivals in the USA, France, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Croatia, and the UK. Kim’s recent orchestral work Spindrift, written for the London Symphony Orchestra, is shortly to be released by the LSO on their own label, complementing existing recordings of his chamber pieces on the Lorelt and Nonclassical labels. Recent large-scale works have been performed by Ensemble InterContemporain, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Orchestra of Opera North, and Orquestra Gulbenkian, while he has collaborated with with chamber groups and solo artists such as Lesley-Jane Rogers, Octandre Ensemble, Clare Hammond, Oliver Coates, Sound Intermedia, VOCAALLAB, Huw Watkins, Geoffrey Paterson, Juliet Fraser, and players from the Budapest Symphony Orchestra. His interest in opera/music theatre is reflected in a long-standing relationship with Paris-based theatre collective La Chambre Aux Echoes, while in the UK his music-theatre piece Tonseisha was performed at the 2014 Tête à Tête Opera Festival with Arts Council funding. During his PhD, Kim studied with Silvina Milstein and George Benjamin at King’s College London; he is now a visiting lecturer at Cambridge University, where for the last 10 years he has taught composition, history, and analysis.