Stefan Asbury has established himself as one of today’s leading exponents of contemporary music and works with virtually all the major contemporary ensembles in Europe.  He has recently been appointed Music Director/Chief Conductor of the contemporary resident Ensemble of the new venue, Casa da Musica in Porto.  As well as conducting six projects per year with the ensemble, he will also be giving the world premiere of a music theatre piece by António Chagas Rosa and Gerrit Komrij Damiao de Gois and Erasmus which will be performed in Rotterdam and Porto in December 2001.

His recent concerts have included concerts with London Sinfonietta (at the Strasbourg MUSICA Festival), Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, ASKO Ensemble (in the Netherlands, Vilnius and on a Far East Tour), the Philharmonia (both in their Music of Today series and as part of the South Bank’s Takemitsu Festival), Ensemble Intercontemporain, New World Symphony (with whom he worked both in the States and in Europe), Rundfunk Symphonie Orchester Berlin, NDR Hannover, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Sinfonia 21, Belgian Radio Orchestra and a project for Tokyo Opera City.  He worked with Norwegian Radio in the 1998 Ultima Festival and returned to conduct them again this Autumn in a programme which included Birtwistle, Castiglioni and Takemitsu.  He also conducted an extremely successful three-concert series of works by Steve Reich, Frank Zappa and Charles Ives with the Britten Sinfonia in Spring 1998 and repeated part of this series with ASKO Ensemble in the Concertgebouw in their American Festival in June 1999.

During the 1999/00 season, Stefan Asbury will make his debut with Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt, Vienna, Cologne and Berlin, conduct a project around the music of Rebecca Saunders for Musikfabrik in Dusseldorf, lead a Kagel project at the Archipel Festival in Geneva, conduct a Contemporary Music Network Tour of the UK with ASKO, and make his debuts with Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Australian Youth Orchestra.  Future dates include WDR Cologne, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Basel Symphony Orchestra, Flemish Radio, Northern Sinfonia, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, Klangforum Wien, Bit20 Ensemble, Orchestre National de Bordeaux/Aquitaine, Norwegian Radio Orchestra, ASKO and Britten Sinfonia.

Stefan Asbury also has a growing reputation for work in opera. As a result of an impressive debut conducting Prokofiev's Love of Three Oranges for the Opera de Lyon in May 1998, he conducted the world premiere of a ballet of works by Hindemith and Gorecki and will also be conducting Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet with the company at the start of the 1999/00 season.  Stefan Asbury is a recipient of the BMW Music Theatre Prize for his conducting of the premiere of Freeze by Rob Zuidam in the Munich Biennale, a production which was repeated in the 1994 Holland Festival.  He made his debut for Opera North in 1994/95 with H K Gruber's Gloria.  Other operatic appearances include performances of Oliver Knussen's opera double bill with the Avanti Chamber Orchestra at the Helsinki Festival in 1996 and concert performances of Paul Bunyan at the Aldeburgh Festival.

His discography includes works by Philip Cashian with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Groups and works by Jonathan Harvey with Ensemble Intercontemporain.  He has also taken part in a recording with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, as second conductor to Oliver Knussen, which was the 1994 Gramophone Award winner in the contemporary music section.