Nicholas Buc
conductor
Nicholas Buc is a composer, conductor, arranger, violinist and pianist. He studied composition at the University of Melbourne, where he received the inaugural Fellowship of Australian Composers Award. As the recipient of the Brian May Scholarship for Australian film composers, he completed a master’s degree in scoring for film and multimedia at New York University, receiving the Elmer Bernstein Award for Film Scoring.
Continuing his passion for music and film, Buc has conducted the live-in-concert world premieres of John Williams’ Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars: The Last Jedi; Alan Menken’s Beauty and the Beast; Hans Zimmer’s The Lion King; Thomas Newman’s Skyfall; Nicholas Hooper’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; and Alexandre Desplat’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2. Other live film concerts he has conducted include Pixar In Concert, Star Trek, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Back to the Future, Casino Royale, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Psycho, Star Wars Episodes IV, V, VI and VII and the other six Harry Potter films. He has conducted all of the major Australian symphony orchestras as well as major orchestras across the U.S., including the Minnesota Orchestra in the first and fourth Harry Potter movies, and he also makes regular appearances in Asia. Outside the film music world, his recent conducting engagements include concerts with Grammy-winning trumpeter Chris Botti, Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls fame and the Australian national tour for singer-songwriter Ben Folds.
As a composer, Buc is regularly commissioned, and some of his works have been premiered by the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, the Australian Voices, the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra, the Benaud Trio and Concordis Chamber Choir. He has also written for film and television, with some of his work being screened at festivals and theatres around Australia, Asia and the U.S. In 2007 he was nominated for “Best Original Song Composed for the Screen” in the APRA-AGSC Screen Music Awards, and in 2015 was a winning finalist of the NYU Film Scoring Competition. Among his new projects is a major theatrical work, TROT, a musical based on Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield written with lyricist Gordon Lindsay. He also recently completed a new ballet score, Kazka, for Lehenda Ukrainian Dance Company, which toured throughout Australia, Canada and the U.S.