John Butt, Artistic Director
John Butt is Gardiner Chair of Music at the University of Glasgow. The majority of his performance activity since 2003 has been as musical director of the Dunedin Consort, involving numerous performances of both Baroque and contemporary repertoire. He has also made 11 recordings on organ, harpsichord and clavichord with Harmonia Mundi (France), including the Bach organ sonatas, the toccatas and Schübler chorales. He has also recorded Elgar’s complete organ music and several recordings for the BBC. As soloist and conductor he has performed throughout the world, including the Göttingen Handel Festspiele, Philharmonia Baroque and the Berkeley Festival (where he directed a newly discovered Scarlatti opera in 1996); recent recital tours have taken him to the USA, Canada, Germany, Bermuda, Istanbul, Poland and Korea. In 2008 he (together with Kevin Bowyer) will perform the entire organ works of Olivier Messiaen.
As a musicologist, John has published five books with Cambridge University Press, relating to Bach, the baroque period, modernity and our contemporary culture of historical performance. He has written numerous articles and reviews and has several essays in the Oxford and Cambridge Companions to Bach, New Grove 2 and the Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music. He is also co-editor of the Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music. His book, Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions, will be appearing in 2009. John has been elected to Fellowship of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2003 he received the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association and his book, Playing with History, was shortlisted for the book prize of the British Academy.