Steuart Bedford
conductor, classical pianist (1939–2021)
Steuart John Rudolf Bedford (31 July 1939 – 15 February 2021) was an English orchestral and opera conductor and pianist.
He was the brother of composer David Bedford and of singer Peter Lehmann Bedford and a grandson of Liza Lehmann and Herbert Bedford; his parents were Leslie Bedford, an inventor, and Lesley Duff, a soprano opera singer.
Bedford was particularly associated with the music of Benjamin Britten, and conducted the world premiere of Death in Venice in 1973. Bedford also conducted Britten's other operas, and made an orchestral suite of music from Death in Venice. Between 1974 and 1998, he was one of the artistic directors of the Aldeburgh Festival. In 1989, he became joint artistic director with Oliver Knussen. In the summer of 2013, Bedford conducted a performance of Peter Grimes which was staged in its natural setting on the beach at Aldeburgh. His book Knowing Britten, compiled through his conversations with the tenor Christopher Gillett, was published in June 2021 by the Britten Press.
His other work in contemporary opera included conducting the 1996 world premiere in Monte Carlo of Lowell Liebermann's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and also the 1999 US premiere.
Bedford conducted several commercial recordings of Britten operas, including the first recording of Death in Venice (Decca), as well as The Turn of the Screw (Collins Classics, since reissued on Naxos).
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7611678. VIAF identifies the subject as 75062670. The Library of Congress control number is n81067921. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1939, 2021, 1973 and 1974.
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This entry incorporates text from “Steuart Bedford” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.