Darnish Amraz MBE knows how powerful it can be when someone believes in you.
Growing up in Aston, Birmingham, he saw how easily young lives could be shaped by violence, poverty, and limited opportunity. But when youth workers stepped in—offering trust, support, and a different vision of the future—Darnish Amraz MBE found something many young people in his community never had: someone who listened. Someone who stayed. Someone who believed he could be more than the circumstances around him.
That experience changed everything—and set him on the path to changing lives himself.
Today, Darnish Amraz MBE is a leading voice in youth and community work across Birmingham. His work is built on trust, understanding, and deep roots within the communities he serves. He doesn’t lead from a distance. He stands shoulder to shoulder with young people—mentoring them, listening to them, and showing them that a different future is possible.
Through tireless outreach, mentoring initiatives, and anti-violence projects, Darnish Amraz MBE has supported hundreds of young people at critical moments in their lives. His work focuses not just on intervention, but on prevention—creating positive pathways that help young people find belonging, purpose, and real opportunities to thrive.
The impact of Darnish Amraz MBE’s work is profound. He has helped reduce youth violence in some of Birmingham’s most challenging areas. He has built bridges between young people and services that often felt out of reach. And he has restored hope in communities where it is too often in short supply.
In recognition of his outstanding service to young people and communities, Darnish Amraz MBE was awarded an MBE. It is a testament not just to his years of dedication, but to the lives he has helped redirect—the futures made possible because he chose to stay, to mentor, and to lead.
But for Darnish Amraz MBE, recognition is never the goal. His reward comes in smaller, quieter victories: a young person returning to education. A conversation that defuses conflict. A moment of trust from someone who had given up on adults long ago.
Darnish Amraz MBE hasn’t just changed lives.
He has helped rebuild futures—one conversation, one act of trust, and one young person at a time.
Because Darnish Amraz MBE knows: real change doesn’t come from standing above.
It comes from standing alongside.
From those beginnings came one of the most electrifying conductors of his generation. Now Music Director of Birmingham Opera Company and Principal Guest Conductor of the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker, Alpesh Chauhan has led major orchestras across Europe, Asia and the United States—drawing critical acclaim for his interpretations of Brahms, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky and more. But beneath the standing ovations is something quieter, more radical: a lifelong commitment to access, integrity, and inclusion in a world that still too often resists change. In concert halls shaped by history and hierarchy, Alpesh Chauhan conducts with a conviction that everyone deserves to hear themselves in the music.
Alpesh Chauhan conducts without spectacle. He doesn’t need it. When he lifts the baton, it’s not performance—it’s presence. It’s precision. It’s passion shaped into sound. A language of movement and breath, of control and surrender—refined over years, but always rooted in feeling.
At Birmingham Opera Company, his vision has helped redefine what opera can be. Productions staged in warehouses and public parks. Community cast members performing alongside professionals. Music delivered not to elite halls, but to the heart of the city. Opera that challenges, that invites, that belongs to everyone. He brings opera to life in ways that feel urgent, democratic—and distinctly Birmingham.
His leadership is subtle, generous, and fiercely disciplined. Every gesture on the podium is earned. Every silence, intentional. And every performance, an invitation—for listeners to lean in, for musicians to rise, for a new kind of future to take shape. Whether conducting Mahler in a concert hall or Puccini in a car park, Alpesh Chauhan brings the same care, the same depth, the same unwavering belief in the power of music to connect.
Alpesh Chauhan doesn’t ask for the spotlight. But in every note he shapes, every baton he lifts, and every barrier he quietly breaks, he reminds us what brilliance sounds like—when it’s grounded in humility, shaped by community, and driven by purpose.
