Mark Urquhart is an Aberdonian and first experienced orchestral music there as a teenager at the Cowdray Hall instilling a lifelong love of live music.

Having studied at Robert Gordon’s in the city, he went up to read PPE at Oxford before a year in Harvard and completed a PhD in the Politics of Nationalism at Edinburgh University.

Mark Joined Baillie Gifford as an investment trainee in 1996 and was promoted to partner in 2004. For the last twenty years has worked on one of the firm’s largest global investment strategies becoming Head of the team in 2019. He has been a board member of the Spartans Community Foundation for several years and has also been involved philanthropically with several arts organisations with a focus on access.

His connection to the SCO has been as a keen concert-goer for many years and more recently as a benefactor along with his wife although his musical talent is confined to listening and appreciating rather than playing.