Music Director

As the Founder and Music Director of the Scotland-based chamber orchestra The Mahler Players, Tomas Leakey has created an ensemble of high quality and cultural significance. The orchestra has collaborated with world-renowned artists, recorded a well-received album featuring a groundbreaking new work by Matthew King: Richard Wagner in Venice: A Symphony, and has been praised in the press as “outstanding” and “Scotland’s best-kept musical secret” (Michael Tumelty, The Herald Scotland) and “the adventurous, excellent Mahler Players” (Geoff Brown, The Times). With this orchestra Tomas has conducted most of Mahler’s music, as well as a wide range of work ranging in period from Bach to Boulez and contemporary composers.

Tomas currently has a focus on opera, and in particular Wagner, which has included concert performances of complete acts from Die Walküre, Tristan und Isolde and Siegfried and well as substantial excerpts from Tannhäuser, Götterdämmerung and Parsifal. He has worked with many celebrated artists, including Sir John Tomlinson, Magdalena Anna Hofmann, Peter Wedd, Lee Bisset and Brad Cooper. In 2021 he commissioned and conducted the world premiere performance and critically acclaimed recording of Matthew King’s Richard Wagner in Venice: A Symphony, a work which brings to life some of Wagner’s incomplete sketches, many of which had never been heard before. Tomas’ work on the music of Wagner led to him being awarded the Bayreuth Stipendium by the Wagner Society Scotland in 2022.

In the youth music and educational realm, Tomas is the conductor of the Highland Regional Youth Orchestra and he has also led projects in which works such as 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 children.

Tomas began his musical life as a trombonist, playing in the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland. He is also a pianist and began conducting during his time at the University of Cambridge. He studied with and was encouraged in his conducting by the formidable late George Hurst and undertook additional study with Denise Ham at the London Conducting Academy and at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. He further developed his craft through attending masterclasses, including with Johannes Schlaefli, Alexander Vedernikov and Toby Purser. Another important influence has been the conductor Anthony Negus.

Highlights of 2023/24 season include a concert performance of Act 3 from Wagner’s Siegfried, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony and his debut with the Aberdeen City Orchestra.

Tomas is represented by Connaught Artists.

Leakey was across all the detail as conductor, and with some very fine individual performances, from the brass fanfare that starts Act 2 to its conclusion, he shaped the central section of the evening perfectly.
Keith Bruce, Vox Carnyx

“His Mahler Nine on a small chamber orchestra, reminiscent in its configuration of Schoenberg’s chamber groupings for private performances early last century, was outstanding…everything quintessentially Mahlerian was there, from the chamber music textures, properly proportioned in the reduced numbers, to the vast emotional flux of the music, all phenomenally characterised in Leakey’s pinpoint interpretation.”
Michael Tumelty, The Herald Scotland