Chloe Rooke  

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Chloe is Assistant Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra for the season 2022/23. She won the Contemporary Award at the first International Conducting Competition in Rotterdam in May 2022 and the Audience Prize at the Donatella Flick-LSO Conducting Competition in 2021. She also attracted attention as the youngest competitor of the 2021 Malko Competition: “Many will leave Copenhagen with memories of Chloe Rooke, the young British conductor who lit the competition up with her sense of music’s joy and communicative potential” – Andrew Mellor, Gramophone. 

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Last season Chloe conducted the London Symphony Orchestra twice at the Barbican in family concerts and made her debut with the BBC Concert Orchestra conducting several world premieres by young British composers, invited back for a concert at Saffron Hall in January 2023. This Summer she assisted at the Glyndebourne Festival on Donizetti Don Pasquale, having already assisted on Magic Flute in Nancy and with Britten A Midsummer Night’s Dream coming up at Opera Rouen. After conducting Così fan tutte in her own right with the Dutch National Opera Academy in Amsterdam in July 2022, she was invited back to conduct La finta giardiniera in Summer 2023, this time with the Residentie Orkest in the pit.

Her new position as Assistant Conductor at the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic (supporting their Chief Conductor Karina Canellakis, in addition to John Adams and Sir James MacMillan among others) follows upon two years of post-graduate study on the Dutch National Master in Orchestral Conducting, where she was mentored by Jac Van Steen, Kenneth Montgomery, Ed Spanjaard and Antony Hermus. Prior to that she studied under Sian Edwards at the Royal Academy in London, where she was awarded the Ernst Read Conducting prize and Fred Southall Memorial prize and an MA in Orchestral Conducting (Distinction).

 

Passionate about music’s role in bringing social transformation, Chloe was recently announced as Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of Street Orchestra Live (the UK’s first street orchestra), her association dating back to 2019. SOL holds the mantra ‘Music for everyone, anywhere’, touring each year to parts of England with limited access to the arts. Each performance exudes the ensemble’s core ethos: to share the joy of music in the every-day and invite unassuming passers-by to join in the party for a moment in time.

 

Chloe began her conducting journey with a passion to bring people together to forge meaningful relationships and powerful performances, initially working with student and amateur orchestras at Oxford (where she graduated with first class honours in 2018) and in London.