Gillian Moore to become Artistic Associate at the Southbank Centre
Gillian Moore CBE is to become the Southbank Centre’s Artistic Associate, taking up the role in the autumn of 2022.
Gillian will report to Mark Ball, Artistic Director, and among her responsibilities she will develop new, large scale projects and collaborative initiatives that support music and creative engagement at the Southbank Centre, as well as create new music-focused digital content for the Southbank Centre’s digital channels.
She will leave her current role of Director, Music and Performing Arts in July.
“The Southbank Centre is, for me, the greatest arts venue anywhere, with its location by the river, its open and optimistic architecture, its heritage of welcome and inclusion and its brilliant and diverse community of artists and audiences. I’m so very pleased to continue my association with this special place in a new, part-time role and to work with Mark Ball and the team as well as our community of musicians and artists to help shape ideas for the future.”
Gillian joined the Southbank Centre in 1993 as Head of Education until 1996, after which she spent 10 years combining a part-time role in the music team with the role of Artistic Director of New Music Manchester (1998), and subsequently the role of Artistic Director of the London Sinfonietta (1998-2006). She returned to the Southbank Centre as Head of Contemporary Culture in 2006, taking over the brief for Classical Music in 2011.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, she worked with the Southbank Centre’s Resident Orchestras to respond to Black Lives Matter by creating an online season of orchestral concerts, highlighting black composers and performers, including commissioning new work. She remains committed to challenging inequity in the arts through initiatives such as the Southbank Centre's Women in Music programmes and established a close relationship from the beginning with Chineke!, Europe's first majority black orchestra, who have recently become a Resident Orchestra.
Highlights of Gillian’s work at the Southbank Centre include: pioneering collaborations between contemporary classical music and electronic/rock and pop creators, including the ground-breaking Warp Records projects from 2003 and a major collaboration with Jonny Greenwood and Radiohead in 2005; and dance collaborations including Scott Walker with Candoco Dance Company and Akram Khan with Steve Reich. Commissions include: Kaija Saariaho; Thomas Ades; Gerald Barry; Anna Meredith; Scott Walker; Luciano Berio; Philip Glass; Steve Reich; Liza Lim; Louis Andriessen; Betsy Jolas; Anna Clyne; Harrison Birtwistle; Du Yun and many more.
Gillian has programmed many of the Southbank Centre’s festivals including the multi-award winning The Rest is Noise Festival, in collaboration with the London Philharmonic Orchestra; a 10-day festival of Science and the Arts in collaboration with The Royal Society; Changing Minds, a festival of arts and mental health with Marin Alsop and Patricia Kopatchinskaja.
Significant classical projects include residencies by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel with the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra and turning the entire Royal Festival Hall building into a week-long opera festival for Opera North's award-winning 2016 Ring Cycle, plus a production of Bernstein's Mass, led by Marin Alsop and involving over 400 non-professional performers including youth ensembles, refugee choirs and amateur singers.
During her time at the Southbank Centre, Gillian has received recognition and awards, including a CBE in 2019 and the ABO Award 2000 for the most significant contribution to orchestral life in the UK.
An acknowledged expert on classical music, Gillian talks, writes and broadcasts frequently about the arts and broader cultural questions. Her 2019 book on Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was named as one of the best books of the year by the Financial Times. Gillian will combine her new role at the Southbank Centre while continuing her work in broadcasting and writing about music and the arts.
“Gillian’s extraordinary passion and her energetic personality are inseparable from the amazing success story that is classical music at the Southbank Centre. Over more than 25 years, her steadfast commitment to music education - and to getting new audiences to love classical music the way she does - has meant that the Southbank Centre today has a world-class and unrivalled music programme, with new and diverse enthusiastic audiences. I’m so pleased that her brilliantly creative brain will continue to contribute to a new chapter in our artistic story.”
“Over three decades at the Southbank Centre, Gillian Moore’s artistic leadership has made an immense contribution not just to the Southbank Centre, but to the wider cultural health of London and the UK. Gillian’s contribution to classical music in particular has seen new orchestras emerge and flourish, landmark festivals develop and grow and collaborative music projects that have pushed the art-form forward. Building on these achievements, I’m excited to be working closely with Gillian in her new role as Artistic Associate, and to develop together new ideas and projects that will continue to see the Southbank Centre at the centre of a thriving arts and music ecology.”