Bill Barclay
About
Director, writer and composer Bill Barclay is best-known for creating over 20 innovative productions of concert-theatre for the world’s leading orchestras, including The Chevalier, Secret Byrd, Peer Gynt, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. He is Artistic Director of Concert Theatre Works and Music Before 1800, NYC’s oldest early music presenter, and was Director of Music at Shakespeare’s Globe in London from 2012-2019.
2025 is Barclay’s 11th season with the BSO family, with Romeo & Juliet marking his sixth world premiere. He also brings his Letters to a Young Poet adaptation to the Tanglewood Learning Institute with The Parker Quartet.
Barclay has developed multimedia concerts for The Hollywood Bowl, The Kennedy Center, The Barbican, The Royal Albert Hall, Buckingham Palace, Shakespeare’s Globe, St Martin-in-the-Fields, Washington National Cathedral, and London's Southbank Centre. Broadway and West End credits include Farinelli and the King, Twelfth Night, and Richard III, all starring Sir Mark Rylance.
A “personable polymath” (London Times), Barclay’s works have been described as “witty and incisive” (New York Times), “quietly transfixing” (The New Yorker), and “quite simply exquisite” (The Guardian). Partners include The London Philharmonic Orchestra, LA Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, The National Symphony Orchestra, and orchestras in Cincinnati, St Louis, Milwaukee, Buffalo, New Jersey, Virginia, North Carolina, Harlem, and more.
Barclay regularly collaborates with elite early music ensembles. Secret Byrd, his recent immersive concert, was created for The Gesualdo Six and Fretwork and has toured to 30 cities. Other ensembles include Music of the Baroque, Handel & Haydn Society, Orchestra for the Age of Enlightenment, The English Concert, The Sixteen, and Barokksolistene.
Barclay has directed the Silkroad Ensemble on tour, created Beyond Beethoven 9 for Marin Alsop, produced Four Seasons Reimagined for Max Richter and puppeteers Gyre & Gimble, conducted City of London Sinfonia on tour, directed Apollo Resurrected with Gandini Juggling, and directed Danielle de Niese in Kurt Weill's Seven Deadly Sins last season for The New World Symphony.
As a composer, Barclay scored the historic Hamlet Globe-to-Globe which toured to 189 countries, and Call of the Wild that performed in 42 US states. He has composed three times for the British Royal Family, for President Obama, for the Olympic Torch, at the United Nations, and in refugee camps in Jordan and Calais.
Barclay's work is regularly featured in major international festivals: Spoleto, Caramoor, Chautauqua, Lammermuir, Latitude, Death of Classical, Oxford, Santa Fe, Teatro a Mil, Canterbury, and many others. He is published on the music of Shakespeare in both Cambridge and Oxford University Presses, and his plays are published by Next Stage Press. MFA Boston University, and alumni of the BU Tanglewood Institute.