Bart Thiede | Musical Director & Conductor

BIOGRAPHY

Bartosz Thiede is a musical director, conductor and sound designer known for bringing clarity, energy and calm leadership to ambitious productions. Working across opera, theatre and musical theatre, he is equally comfortable conducting an orchestra, leading a band from the keyboard, training a choir or helping shape a new show from its earliest stages, with a particular strength in collaborative and newly created work. A Music graduate of Exeter College, University of Oxford, where he was Parry-Wood Organ Scholar, he trained in conducting with Paul Spicer and conducts bands, choirs and orchestras. Earlier appointments include Director of Music at St Canice’s Cathedral, Choral Director at Kilkenny College and artistic leadership roles with Music in Kilkenny and the Passio Festival. He is a regular Musical Director at Oxford Playhouse, with productions including Jack and the Beanstalk (2023–24), Sleeping Beauty (2024–25), Dick Whittington (2025–26) and Snow White (2026–27). Oxford Playhouse has repeatedly brought him back as part of its creative team, while a review of Dick Whittington singled out his live band for keeping the production’s music “tight” and its tempo “snappy.” His new-work credits include composer and Musical Director of Have You Met Stan?, developed as an OFFBEAT Supported Artist project before touring to Brighton Fringe and London’s King’s Head Theatre, and Musical Director, arranger and sound designer for Oxford Playhouse’s History of (Almost) Everything. His theatre work also includes T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral with Oxford Theatre Guild. He has worked internationally on projects at venues including La Scala, Philharmonie de Paris, Alexandra Palace and Künstlerhaus Munich, as well as at the Tower of London and St Paul’s Cathedral, and has directed a choir for the Bavarian Royal Family. Bartosz also works extensively in community and youth theatre. Recent projects include Fame Jr. at the New Theatre Oxford, where around 80 young performers created the production in a week before an audience of more than 800, and Oxford People’s Theatre’s adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, exploring Motor Neurone Disease. He coaches singers from children through to adults, and his broadcast work includes projects for BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and RTÉ, the Irish state broadcaster, including a Christmas Day broadcast.