Oliver Zeffman

Conductor Oliver Zeffman is the man behind the world’s first opera recorded on an iPhone: Eight Songs from Isolation, a pandemic-themed collaboration with Apple Music, featuring contributions from eight leading composers that include Thomas Adès and Nico Muhly. Born in the early 1990s in London, Zeffman picked up the violin at four; when he was only 16, he founded Melos Sinfonia, an orchestra of young professionals. With Melos, Zeffman has given the Russian premieres of important 20th-century works, including Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King, and led an international tour of George Benjamin’s opera Written on Skin. After studying history and Russian at Durham University, Zeffman attended the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and the Royal Academy of Music. He was an assistant to Valery Gergiev, and in the 2019-20 season he served as associate conductor of the London Chamber Orchestra, touring to the Mariinsky Theatre's Stars of the White Nights festival. Zeffman’s second collaboration with Apple was a live performance film at London's V&A Museum, in the Raphael Court. Released in 2021, Live At The V&A features violinist Viktoria Mullova and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.