Alexander Gibson

Sir Alexander Drummond Gibson (11 February 1926 – 14 January 1995) was a Scottish conductor and opera intendant. He was also well known for his service to the BBC and his achievements during his reign as the longest serving principal conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in which the orchestra was awarded its Royal Patronage. Biography Gibson was born in Motherwell in 1926 and brought up in the village of New Stevenston, the son of James McClure Gibson and his wife Wilhelmina Williams. He was introduced to professional opera at the age of 12 when his parents took him to a performance of Madam Butterfly at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow. He was educated at Dalziel High School. He excelled at the piano and organ, and at 18 became the organist at Hillhead Congregational Church, Glasgow while studying music at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. In 1943 he matriculated at the University of Glasgow to study Music and English. After his first year, however, the war interrupted his studies and he served with the Royal Signals Band until 1948 when he took up a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London, after which Sir Alexander Gibson studied at the Mozarteum, Salzburg under Igor Markevitch, and under Paul Van Kempen at the Accademia Chigiana, Siena. He was Assistant Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 1952–54 and conducted two productions for the amateur Glasgow Grand Opera Society in 1954. At the time of his appointment in 1957 as musical director of Sadler's Wells, he was the youngest ever to have taken that position. He met his wife Veronica at Sadlers Wells and they married in 1958.