Gordon Williams

writer and speaker on music as well as an opera librettist. He has presented pre-concert talks for orchestras including the Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras and co-produced radio-documentaries such as The US of Opera, a survey of US so-called ‘CNN opera’, broadcast on ABC Classic-FM in 1999.

Mr. Williams wrote the script for Journey to Horseshoe Bend, a dramatic-cantata composed by Andrew Schultz and presented at Sydney Opera House by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2003. He also devised new dialogue for the Sydney Symphony’s first performance in 160 years of Don John of Austria, and produced Darwin Theatre Group’s ensemble-piece Dust-Off Vietnam, for which he was also a playwright and actor.

He has written narrations for orchestral presentations (eg. Beethoven’s Egmont, presented, most recently, by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra), and writes for The Podium and for Opera Australia. A graduate of UCLA’s Extension program in Screenwriting, he has assessed scripts for Australians in Film’s Gateway LA project. For six years from 1999 to 2005, Gordon was editor of publications for Symphony Services International (based in Sydney), responsible for producing some 200 orchestral program booklets per year. Since 2011, he has been based in the US.