James Burton (conductor)

James Burton (born 1974) is a British conductor and composer. He is the conductor of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the choral director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Burton was born in London and was educated at Westminster Abbey Choir School (where he was Head Chorister in 1987) and Radley College. He read music at St John's College Cambridge where he was a Choral Scholar, and he completed a master's degree in Orchestral Conducting at the Peabody Conservatory, where he studied with Frederik Prausnitz and Gustav Meier. He has been engaged as a music director, conductor and chorus master for a wide variety of groups and projects, and has also worked as a composer and arranger, notably for American folk singer Arlo Guthrie.

Between 2002 and 2009 Burton was Choral Director at the Hallé Orchestra, and became music Director of the Hallé Youth Choir when it was founded in 2003. He prepared both choirs for the award-winning recording of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius which won the 2009 Gramaphone Choral Award.

In 2002 he became the Music Director of Schola Cantorum of Oxford, the chamber choir established in 1960 and now well known which is made up of singers who are studying at Oxford University. He has led the choir on international tours, conducted recordings on the Hyperion label and appeared in BBC TV films about British composers made by John Bridcut.

Burton has a long-standing association with the St Endellion Music Festivals in Cornwall, and became Music Director of the Easter Festival in 2007, succeeding Richard Hickox. At the 2012 festival he conducted the world premiere of his new composition The Convergence of the Twain. Scored for chorus, orchestra and baritone, this work is a setting of Thomas Hardy's poem of the same title and has been written in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.

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