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Scott Lawton (born 1960 in New Castle, Pennsylvania) is an American conductor based in Germany. He has served as the Principal Conductor of the Deutsches Filmorchester Babelsberg in Potsdam since 1999. His activities with the Filmorchester include performances of silent films and studio recordings for film and television productions. Since 2004 has also served as Music Director of the summer festival in Bad Gandersheim and since 2005 is conductor of the LPO NRW, a symphonic wind ensemble based in Wuppertal. He is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory and the University of Cincinnati. Parallel to his Cincinnati studies, he worked with Vincent Persichetti in preparing the world premiere in Philadelphia of the opera "The Sibyl". During a subsequent year of graduate studies at the Louisiana State University, he assisted opera singer Martina Arroyo as she began her teaching career.
Prior to working with the Filmorchester he was staff conductor at the opera houses in Saarbrücken, Bielefeld and Trier and led major musical productions of The Phantom of the Opera, Les Misérables and 42nd Street in Vienna, Miss Saigon in Stuttgart, Cyrano in Amsterdam and Chicago in Berlin, Munich, Basel and Düsseldorf. At the Wiener Kammeroper he conducted productions of The Marriage of Figaro and Rigoletto.
An advocate of genre-crossing symphonic projects, he has worked closely together with Omara Portuondo and the Buena Vista Social Club, Scorpions, Udo Lindenberg and K...!. With Scorpions he has toured Russia and the Baltic countries. In 2005 he led a tour of symphonic film music with guest singer Johannes Heesters. He has conducted the annual televised José Carreras Benefit Gala in Leipzig since 2000; during the same year he began a regular collaboration with the Berlin music festival Classic Open Air am Gendarmenmarkt. A series of crossover concerts in Potsdam's Nikolaisaal continues in September 2006 with a project with Joy Denalane.
As a guest conductor he has led the Kölner Rundfunkorchester, Gürzenich Orchester Köln, Wuppertaler Sinfoniker, Saarländisches Staatstheater and the Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester.
He has led premiere performances of orchestral works by Franz Waxman, (reconstruction of the original music to "Liliom"), Sir Malcolm Arnold ("Ballade for Piano and Orchestra" from "Stolen Face"), Ashley Irwin (new live soundtrack to Hitchcock's "The Lodger").
In addition to his conducting, he has remained active as a composer, most recently with the first production in Bad Gandersheim of Mozart in Manhattan, a chamber opera about librettist Lorenzo da Ponte after he became a resident of New York City.
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