STEPHEN JOHNSON
BROADCASTER & WRITER
Stephen Johnson is a writer, broadcaster and lecturer on music. A popular and acclaimed BBC Radio presenter, he won a Sony Gold Award for his documentary Vaughan Williams: Valiant for Truth. He is the author of Bruckner Remembered (Faber 1998), Discover Music of the Classical Era (Naxos 2008) and studies of Mahler and Wagner (Naxos 2006/2007), and is a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Conducting (CUP 2004). He is also a composer, and his orchestral work Behemoth Dances received its world premiere in Moscow in April 2016. His latest work, Angel’s Arc, was premiered in London in January 2019.
Born in Lancashire in 1955, Stephen Johnson studied at the Northern School of Music, Manchester, and under Alexander Goehr at Leeds University.
After a brief period working for BBC Radio 3 – listening to LPs for clicks prior to transmission – he did a postgraduate course at Manchester University (subject: Shostakovich’s String Quartets). Then two friends – the composer Robert Simpson and the record producer Andrew Keener – suggested he try musical journalism. This soon grew into a full-time career.
Since then he has broadcast frequently for BBC Radio 3, 4 and World Service, major projects including 14 programmes about the music of Bruckner for the centenary of the composer’s death (1996), and has written regularly for The Independent, The Guardian, BBC Music Magazineand Gramophone.