VMS Staff

Marco Galvani is a composer and educator based in London. Choral music has been at the core of Galvani's musical output, including commissions for accompanied and a cappella ensembles alike. His work On Christmas Morn was performed by The Sixteen in venues such as Glyndebourne, Cadogan Hall, Sage Gateshead and Birmingham Symphony Hall during their Christmas Tour 2017. Galvani was subsequently commissioned for Stella Caeli by The Sixteen, which was released on CORO in 2018.

Since 2014 Galvani has been working as an Associate Composer with SANSARA resulting in the recent Resonus Classics release 'Invisible Cities', a single composer feature disc including commissions from The Queen's College Choir, Oxford, and Southern Cathedrals Festival, alongside electronic refractions. This sequence of choral works includes pieces from the beginning of Galvani's collaboration with the choir up to the present day, with the album blending electronic and acoustic sounds.

Galvani's recent work has furthered this combination of analogue and digital, including projects such as Play the Stars, commissioned in association with theatre company Leo&Hyde for Liverpool Light Nights 2021 in collaboration with virtual reality artist Rosie Summers. Similarly, Galvani performed live electronics and synthesizers for his sci-fi opera Helena alongside singers and performers from Zeitgeist Ensemble, as part of the Tête à Tête festival 2021. This opera expanded on themes explored in Galvani's second opera Autopilot Saves Model S from 2017, performed at the Oxford Maths institute by Faded Ink Productions, which concerned recent developments in AI and transportation technology.

Allison Stringer is a violinist, interdisciplinary artist and creative practitioner. She specialises in Classical, Contemporary and Interdisciplinary Music and is a Classical and Scottish Music educator. Allison is currently undertaking a PhD at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland/University of St. Andrews studying the Scottish Composer Alexander Campbell Mackenzie (1847-1935). She holds a Masters degree in Violin Performance from Codarts University for the Arts, studying under Gordan Nikolić, and an Honours Bachelor of Music in Violin Performance from Wilfrid Laurier University, studying under the Penderecki String Quartet.

Allison began the violin at the age of 2 ½, later taking up the piano and viola, and has been ensconced in music since. She is an active performer and has appeared in festivals and toured in an orchestral setting throughout North America, Europe and the UK. She has performed in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Gergiev Festival Orchestra in Rotterdam, the Doelen Ensemble, as a soloist premiering jazz inspired new compositions with the Fifty Fiddles Orchestra and as a soloist premiering The Lost and the Damned by Canadian composer Adam Hakooz at De Doelen, Rotterdam. Allison has worked as a session musician in the Folk and Indie Music scene and has performed with internationally renowned artists such as Amanda Palmer and Daniel Martinez.

While Allison is a trained and active performer, she is heavily involved in UK’s specialist music education programmes. She is the Director of Music of the Lochaber Music School in Fort William, she works as a violin teacher at St. Mary’s Music School, runs a Saturday violin school in Edinburgh, works as an external assessor for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and is extremely excited to have joined the VMS and VMS Pathways programme at the Yehudi Menuhin School in 2023

Frank Zielhorst enjoys an international career as conductor and educator. He held the position of Principal Conductor of Sinfonia Viva in Derby and served as Young Conductor in Association with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Frank works regularly with orchestras such as the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Britten Sinfonia, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Ulster Orchestra, the Residentie Orchestra The Hague (Netherlands), the Prague Symphony Orchestra (Czech Republic) and the Orquestra Clássica do Sul (Portugal). He enjoys a special relationship with BSO Resound, a professional disabled-led ensemble.

Frank has been appointed guest teacher for orchestral studies at the Royal College of Music and Musicianship Tutor at the Yehudi Menuhin School. He regularly conducts the student orchestras at the Leeds Conservatoire and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.

Frank is a devoted advocate of music for young children and throughout his career he devoted a large portion of his time to education and outreach work. At Sinfonia Viva, he focused on cultivating creativity: young people composing their own texts and songs, which were orchestrated overnight and performed by the young people together with the orchestra. In school concerts with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, he helped develop songs and body percussion pieces that pupils would perform with the orchestra as part of their concert experience. Frank works as a peripatetic teacher at Sharnbrook Academy in Bedford and runs his own private music academy in Northwood, Greater London, where he teaches piano, violin, viola, conducting, orchestration and music theory.

Having been praised for his “crisp and vibrant style” (Bournemouth Echo), Frank’s conducting has been found to “bring out a clear and broad scala of colours and atmospheres” (De Volkskrant).