British organist, conductor and pianist Richard Gowers performs at the world’s most prestigious venues with top orchestras and conductors while enjoying a diverse freelance career on the London concert scene.

 

In the 2025/26 season Richard Gowers returns to the Berlin Philharmonic for his third recital in back-to-back seasons, including Kabelac’s Symphony No. 3 for Brass, Organ and Timpani, conducted by Jakub Hrůša. He gives his Royal Festival Hall and Royal Philharmonic solo debuts and returns as soloist to the Philharmonia Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall. Recent seasons have seen solo debuts as organist with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Antonio Pappano, and London Philharmonic and Ulster Orchestras. As conductor he debuted with the Academy of Ancient Music in 2023 at the Monreale Festival in Italy, and in 2024 with the London Handel Orchestra, to which he was appointed Principal Conductor.

 

A graduate of Cambridge University, where he was organ scholar at King’s College under the late Sir Stephen Cleobury, and the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied Piano Accompaniment with Michael Dussek and Joseph Middleton, Gowers’s diverse career has seen solo appearances at the Royal Albert Hall, Philharmonie Berlin, Musikverein Vienna in collaboration with trumpeter Matilda Lloyd, Suntory Hall Tokyo, Lotte Concert Hall Seoul, Shanghai Oriental Art Center and Brisbane City Hall. He gives recitals at major festivals such as Toulouse Les Orgues, Hamburger Orgelsommer, Bordeaux Festival International Orgues d’Été, Brisbane Baroque Festival and for the American Guild of Organists. As a song accompanist he has performed at Oxford and Leeds Song Festivals and Wigmore Hall. In opera he was assistant to Finnegan Downie Dear at the 2025 Aix-en-Provence Festival in The Story of Billy Budd, Sailor and directed the children’s chorus for Barry Kosky’s Carmen at Covent Garden.

 

Richard Gowers teaches at the Royal Academy of Music, who elected him an Associate (ARAM) in 2024. He is Director of Music at St George’s Hanover Square, Handel’s church in London, where he conducts annual performances of Messiah and the Bach Passions for the London Handel Festival. His debut album, Messiaen’s La Nativité du Seigneur, was recorded in King’s College Chapel and named a Gramophone ‘Editor’s Choice’, described in the magazine as “tremendously focused and intensely cerebral playing…[conveying] the fundamental musicality of the work”. Gowers grew up in a family of academics in Cambridge and was a chorister in the Choir of King’s College. He took additional study in Germany at the conservatoires of Leipzig and Stuttgart.