Charles Hazlewood

On 24 May 2020 Hazlewood was the guest in the BBC Radio 4 series Desert Island Discs. During the programme he revealed that he had been a victim of sexual abuse throughout his childhood.

Hazlewood is music director of the music ensemble "Army of Generals", formed to record with him all the music he has written for BBC films. . He is also a founder of the British Paraorchestra, which performed together with the band Coldplay at the 2012 Summer Paralympics. The "Army of Generals" supports many of his West Country projects. Appearances include St George's Bristol (partnering the Unthanks in a bespoke orchestral/folk project) in 2017 and at the Park Stage at the 2016 Glastonbury Festival (Philip Glass's Heroes Symphony), where they were also joined by members of the British Paraorchestra.

In 2009, Hazlewood conducted Kurt Weill's musical drama Lost in the Stars, reset in apartheid South Africa, at the South Bank Centre.

Hazlewood created the 2009 BBC Two documentary series The Birth of British Music. He has authored and conducted the music in BBC films on Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky as well as a series exploring the birth of British music. He also appeared on the judging panel for the reality show Classical Star (BBC2 2007) and has anchored the BBC Proms TV coverage since 2001.

!n 2009 Hazlewood was a judge of the popular music industry's creativity awards, the Mercury Music prize.

He authored and presented How Pop Songs Work (BBC Four, 2008); a film with Damon Gough (aka Badly Drawn Boy) entitled Stripping Pop (BBC Three, 2003); and a two part documentary Tones, Drones and Arpeggios: The Magic of Minimalism (BBC Four, 2018), on the history of minimalist music.

Hazlewood has conducted over 100 world premieres. He has also initiated several projects that explore common ground between different musical disciplines, such as "Urban Classic", (2006), which drew together together five grime emcees and the BBC Concert Orchestra. His "Orchestra in a Field" festival took place at Glastonbury in 2012. In 2017, Hazlewood's "Thunderbirds are Go" project, featuring music by Barry Gray and involving members of the Paraorchestra and of the groups Goldfrapp and Portishead, was performed in Bristol.

Hazlewood's radio show, The Charles Hazlewood Show on BBC Radio 2, won three Sony Radio Academy Awards in 2006. The musical selections are "linked together in surprising and productive new ways, with Mozart, for example, followed by Ivor Cutler, then The Streets, then Handel".

Hazlewood was music director of DDK from 2000 to 2007. With the company he also conceived the music for the shows Ibali Loo Tsotsi (The Beggar's Opera); and The Snow Queen, which premiered in New York in 2004.

In 1999, Hazlewood and theatre director Mark Dornford-May created a new opera company in Cape Town from the townships and villages of South Africa; the mostly black lyric-theatre company DDK (Dimpho di Kopane, Sotho for "combined talents") was formed. Of the 40 members, only three had professional training. In January 2001, the company's debut of Bizet's Carmen opened to damning South African reviews, with one newspaper saying it was preposterous for black South Africans to perform Western opera. The Mysteries, for which Hazlewood devised the score, sold out in London's West End in 2003, inciting the first editorial on music in The Times newspaper in 40 years.

Charles Matthew Egerton Hazlewood (born 14 November 1966) is a British conductor. After winning the European Broadcasting Union conducting competition in 1995 whilst still in his twenties, Hazlewood has had a career as an international conductor, music director of film and theatre, composer and a curator of music on British radio and television.