Tomas Leakey

As Music Director of the Mahler Players, a chamber orchestra he founded in 2013 and with whom he has conducted over 50 concerts, Tomas Leakey has conducted many performances of works by Mahler including Symphonies 1, 4, 5, 7, 9, Adagio from 10, Das Lied von der Erde and most of the other song cycles. He has also commissioned and given the world premieres of four new works, including Birth-Rebirth by leading Scottish composer Stuart MacRae. With this orchestra he has also conducted a range of demanding 20th Century works, including by Boulez, Schoenberg, Webern and Stravinsky. The orchestra has been described as “outstanding” and “Scotland’s best-kept musical secret” by Michael Tumelty in the Herald Scotland.
Tomas’ work on the music of Wagner led to him being awarded the 2020 Bayreuth Scholarship by the Wagner Society Scotland.

Passionate about inspiring the next generation, Tomas has also led the Mahler Players through three large-scale educational projects, in which Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, Walton’s Façade and the BBC Ten Pieces were performed in schools across the north of Scotland to hundreds of school-children.

Tomas began his musical life as a trombonist in the Highland Regional Youth Orchestra. He later joined the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland. At the University of Cambridge he was very active on the music scene as a pianist and trombonist and it was there he started conducting.

Tomas studied conducting initially with George Hurst at the Sherborne Summer School of Music and then with Denise Ham at the London Conducting Academy. He undertook a year’s post-graduate study in orchestral conducting at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama with David Jones from 2013 – 14 and since then has taken part in a wide variety of masterclasses, including the Järvi Academy, the Orkney Conductors’ Course with Alexander Vedernikov/Norwegian Radio Orchestra/BBC Singers and International Masterclasses Berlin with Johannes Wildner/Berlin Sinfonietta. He was the joint-winner of the 2016 Orion Conducting Competition, which came with the position of assistant conductor to the Orion Orchestra for the following season.