- Biography
Oliver COPE
Candidate of the 2027 Competition
Oliver Cope (b. 1999) is a British conductor and prize-winner at the 2026 Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition, where he was awarded the BR-KLASSIK studio production prize with the Bamberg Symphony. He is also recent First Prize winner of both the Koussevitzky International Conducting Competition and the International Athens Conducting Competition.
He graduated with First Class Honours and a Scholarship from the University of Cambridge, later studying conducting at the Royal Academy of Music with Sian Edwards and at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland with Martyn Brabbins, where he received the Hugh S. Robertson Prize for Orchestral Conducting.
He has conducted orchestras across the UK and Europe including the Hallé, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Bamberg Symphony, Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, Sønderjyllands Symfoniorkester and Thessaloniki State Symphony Orchestra.
Further competition successes include reaching the finals of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s Calleva Conductors’ Competition and the Mitropoulos Competition, where he received Third Prize with no First Prize awarded, and the semifinals of the Lliria Conducting Competition. He will also take part in the Solti International Conducting Competition next season.
In opera, Cope has conducted Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia with Hampstead Garden Opera, praised by The Spectator as “the sort of night that made you want to drag in an opera sceptic…”. He has worked on the music staff at Grange Park Opera, and leads British Youth Opera’s 2026 production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress at Battersea Arts Centre with Sinfonia Smith Square.
A prize-winning harpist and pianist, he trained with Ieuan Jones, Danielle Perrett and Claudia Schurr.