Rowland has orchestrated many works for other composers, notable among which is “The Carnival of Illusions” by Michael Poel, which has been recorded by the Moscow State Philharmonic Orchestra.
He is the arranger and original music director for Richard Stirling’s musical Over My Shoulder. For the Okai Collier Company he has been the musical director for Elegies, at the Bridewell Theatre and the UK premiere of cult off-Broadway hit Ruthless, at Stratford Circus. Other credits for Musical Direction include; Marry Me A Little and The Great Big Radio Show, at the Bridewell Theatre, five years with Surrey County Youth Theatre and, for Stewart Nicholls at the Theatre Museum in London, A Girl Called Jo, Follow That Girl, Vanity Fair, Zip Goes A Million, The Amazons, Grab me a Gondola, Anne Veronica and Julian Slade’s 70th birthday concert. Other work with Stuart Nicholls includes the reconstructions of David Heneker’s Popkiss and Noel Coward’s Sail Away, published by Warner Chappell.
Many of the above productions are available on CD and The Amazons, which Rowland co-produced, received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Cast Album. In 1986, he was the first recipient of the British Film Institute’s Anthony Asquith Young Composer Award. From 1986-96 he was a Visiting Tutor in film music at the Royal College of Art in London.
Apart from his lifelong work in music Rowland has acquired many skills and is a competent bricklayer and carpenter, a painter and a keen gardener. A collector and restorer of player pianos and reed organs, reproducing pianos and related instruments and music rolls.
Expert in the architecture of all periods, with a special interest in that of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; former voluntary caseworker for the Victorian Society. (Rowland knows more about architecture than music!) A scholar of the life and works of the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and author of a dissertation on this subject, 1983, and co-author of the programme note for the British premiere of Korngold’s opera, “Die Tote Stadt” at the South Bank Centre, 1998.