Gramophone Award-winning conductor Richard Bernas is also Music Consultant at Tate Modern. Events he has developed there include concerts designed for major retrospective exhibitions (Brancusi, Kandinsky, Munoz, Twombly and Rothko); collaborations with BBC Radio 3 and the Almeida Festival; and presenting Alvin Curran’s Maritime Rites in a specially commissioned London Version played by over 200 musicians on and around the Thames just outside the museum.
As well as conducting many of the BBC Orchestras and performing extensively in Europe he has worked with many of today's leading composers. World premieres have varied from Nicholas Maw's Odyssey with the BBC Symphony at the Royal Festival Hall to Karlheinz Stockhausen's Sternklang in the Berliner Tiergarten, including James Dillon’s Oceanos for the BBC Proms and a number of ballets for The Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, where he has been a guest for over a dozen years. Over the last twenty years he has worked with most of the major composers of his generation, ranging from John Adams to Wolfgang Rhim.
Among his CDs he won the 1991 Gramophone Award for contemporary music for his world premiere recording of John Casken’s opera Golem. Recently he returned to Covent Garden for the world premieres of ballets by Christopher Wheeldon and Wayne McGregor and made his debuts with the Hong Kong Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic Orchestras.
