Tony Kime - Conductor
Tony Kime was born in Grantham in 1947. He first took an interest in music when, at the age of five, he saw a piano trio playing in the restaurant of John Lewis' store in Leicester. Thirteen years later he took a BMus at the University College of Wales, studying composition with David Harries, violin with Edward Bor and orchestration with Ian Parrott.
He went on to become a BBC studio manager for Radio 3 in London, where he became addicted to playing in the orchestra pit for musicals. In 1978 he moved to Glasgow to become the sound engineer for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, a position he held for the next twenty years.
As a music recording engineer he has worked in production teams that have won the Japan prize, the Brno prize, the gold medal of the International Radio Festival of New York and a Gramophone award for his recording of James MacMillan's The Confession of Isobel Gowdie. Since retiring from the BBC, he has begun composing again and has re-established his reputation as a violinist in his new home in the Borders.
In 2006 Tony founded the Nenthorn String Quartet for which he has written many arrangements of popular songs and Scots music. His second book of arrangements was published in 2010. Peebles Orchestra was delighted to premiere his work The Tweed - thinking it through for narrator, string quartet and orchestra as part of a literary themed concert in November 2007. In 2009 he founded the Scottish Romance Orchestra (based on the Nenthorn String Quartet) which has enjoyed great acclaim from audiences throughout the Borders. His addiction to playing in pits remains unabated.