Conducting Gatehouse started his professional conducting career as the musical director of the
Ballet Rambert (1974–78). He was also the founding conductor of the Wolsey Orchestra (1972–76), then an amateur chamber orchestra. He then became the principal conductor and musical director of the
Dutch National Ballet (1978–89) and of the Dutch National Youth Orchestra (1980–90).
Radio 3 In 1991, Gatehouse gave up full-time conducting to join
Radio 3, the
BBC's classical music radio station, at first as a producer and subsequently as the editor for live music. He made radio programmes, including documentaries on the Russian ballet dancer
Rudolf Nureyev and the Russian composer
Sergei Prokofiev, which received
Sony Radio Awards. He founded the BBC
Wigmore Hall lunchtime concert series in 1998, which was broadcast on Radio 3, and continued to run it until 2013. He also founded the
London Symphony Orchestra's lunchtime concert series at
St Luke's. He was also responsible for special Radio 3 programming on several composers, including composer weeks for
Schubert and
Tchaikovsky. when he left Radio 3. Prominent musicians who participated in the scheme include the pianists
Benjamin Grosvenor,
Igor Levit,
Paul Lewis and
Steven Osborne, violinist
Alina Ibragimova, trumpeter
Alison Balsom, percussionist
Colin Currie, mezzo-soprano
Alice Coote and the
Belcea Quartet.
Meurig Bowen, director of the
Cheltenham Music Festival, commented that his "gift for detecting signs of greatness early on in musicians' careers has proved to be second-to-none."
Other roles Gatehouse served on the jury of the
Leeds International Piano Competition in 2012 and 2015, and in 2015, he took over from
Fanny Waterman as the artistic director of the competition, initially jointly with Paul Lewis, and from 2019, as the sole director. Martin Cullingford, writing in
Gramophone magazine, commented that "Gatehouse's role in launching the BBC New Generation Artists scheme ... well places him to help discover the next generation of keyboard greats." In 2006, he founded the
Festival de Valloires, a week-long
chamber music festival held at
Argoules, France, which he also directed. He serves on the Artistic Committee of the
Borletti-Buitoni Trust, a charitable trust that gives grants to young musicians. ==References==