Christopher Lyndon-Gee is an unusually versatile figure, noteworthy as a conductor, composer, pianist, organist, educator, and musicologist. In most of his activities, he has been a champion of contemporary music. Lyndon-Gee was born in London. He attended the University of Durham, graduating with first-class honors. He studied conducting in London with Rudolf Schwarz, moving on to Rome for further work with Franco Ferrara, earning a Diploma di Perfezionamento in conducting at the Conservatorio S. Cecilia. During his studies in Rome, Lyndon-Gee was spotted by star conductor Leonard Bernstein, who invited him to come to the Tanglewood summer music courses as a conductor. He worked there with conductors Erich Leinsdorf and Maurice de Abravanel, among others. As a composer, Lyndon-Gee studied with Goffredo Petrassi, Luciano Berio, and Jean Martinon. He stayed on in Italy as an assistant to composer-conductor Bruno Maderna at the La Scala opera house, later conducting the orchestra of the Teatro Regio in Turin and the RAI Torino Orchestra. In Italy, he also founded the Ensemble Fase Seconda. Lyndon-Gee also studied the organ, becoming a Fellow and an Associate of the Royal College of Organists. As a musicologist, he was mentored by Arthur Hutchings. Lyndon-Gee spent 12 years in Australia, serving as the chief conductor of the Canberra Pro Arte Orchestra and organizing festivals devoted to contemporary music. He also commissioned numerous new works as a pianist, and his works were widely played and honored. He won the Onassis Foundation Prize in 2001 for his ballet Il poeta muore, earned three Sounds Australian awards, and won two prestigious MacDowell Fellowships in the U.S. As a conductor based in the U.S., he has led orchestras across Europe, Russia, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as in North America. Since 2002, he has been on the faculty at Adelphi University on Long Island, New York. Lyndon-Gee's discography is impressively large and has been devoted in the main to contemporary music. In the 1990s, he recorded the complete orchestral works of Igor Markevitch with the Arnhem Philharmonic Orchestra for the Marco Polo label. In 1993, he became one of the first conductors to sign an ongoing contract with the Naxos label, which reissued the Markevitch albums and has issued other Lyndon-Gee albums devoted to contemporary composers from Hans Werner Henze to George Rochberg and Valentin Silvestrov, whose Symphony No. 7 he recorded with the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra and released in 2020. ~ James Manheim