Composers
Judith Weir
© Chris Christodoulou
Born: 1954
Brief Biography: Judith Weir’s music has achieved considerable popularity with audiences and critics alike. She trained with John Tavener while still at school and subsequently with Robin Holloway at Cambridge University. Her music is characterised by a distinctive textural clarity and a lucid but idiosyncratic harmonic idiom. Often drawing on sources from medieval history, as well as the traditional stories and music of her native Scotland, she is best known for her operas and theatre works, although she has also achieved considerable international renown for her extensive catalogue of orchestral and chamber works. Her orchestral music has been performed around the world and commissioned by the leading orchestras such as Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, CBSO and the Minnesota Orchestras.
For a complete biography, click here.
Key Works:- King Harald’s Saga
(1979; soprano singing eight roles) - A Night at the Chinese Opera
(1987; opera) - We Are Shadows
(1999; choir, orchestra) - The welcome arrival of rain
(2001; orchestra) - Tiger under the Table (2002; chamber ensemble)
- Piano Trio Two (2003-4; piano trio)
- CONCRETE (2007; narrator, choir, orchestra)
| Career Highlights:- 1987 premiere of A Night at the Chinese Opera by Kent Opera
- 1995-8 Fairburn Composer in Association, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
- 2000 premiere of woman.life.song at Carnegie Hall, commissioned by Jessye Norman
- 2001 South Bank Show music award
- 2005 premiere broadcast of Armida, opera for Channel Four Television
- 2008 BBC Symphony Orchestra present Telling the Tale, a weekend of music by Judith Weir
|
Critical Acclaim:
[CONCRETE is] a terrifically accessible and thrilling evocation of the changing history of London, and the Barbican in particular. Vivd, moving and unashamedly lyrical, this was Weir at her glorious, ecstatic best.
— Stephen Pritchard, The Observer
...this fascinating piece [CONCRETE], at once incisive and elusive, listener-friendly but potent in substance, is typical of Weir’s compositional craft and imagination…
— Geoffrey Norris, The Telegraph
With her three-out –of-three success rate, Judith Weir must be considered one of the most successful British opera composers since Britten.
— Hugh Canning, The Sunday Times
[CONCRETE is] Quirkily inventive and sparely elegant, with passages of dainty chinoiserie alongside outbursts of almost Wagnerian sonority, it has the Stravinskian capacity to be both witty and beautiful at the same time.
— Rupert Christiansen, The Daily Telegraph
Full Biography:
JUDITH WEIR‘s interests in narrative, folklore and theatre have found expression in a wide range of musical invention. She is the composer and librettist of three operas (A Night at the Chinese Opera, The Vanishing Bridegroom and Blond Eckbert). Folk music from the British Isles and beyond has influenced her extended series of pieces for the Schubert Ensemble. For many years she has written music for performances in England and India with storyteller Vayu Naidu; and she has worked on numerous film and music collaborations with Margaret Williams, the most recent being Armida, a one-hour television opera commissioned by Channel 4 and first shown in 2006. During a period in the 1990s as resident composer with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, she wrote several new works for orchestra and chorus (including Forest and We are Shadows) and has also been commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Music Untangled and Natural History) the Minnesota Orchestra (The Welcome Arrival of Rain) and Carnegie Hall (woman.life.song, a song cycle written for Jessye Norman).
Judith Weir was born into a Scottish family in 1954, but grew up near London. She was an oboe player, performing with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, and had a few composition lessons with John Tavener during her schooldays. She attended Cambridge University, where her composition teacher was Robin Holloway, and on leaving there spent several years as a community musician in rural southern England. She then returned to Scotland to work as a university teacher in Glasgow. Since the 1990s she has been based in London, and was artistic director of the Spitalfields Festival for six years. She has continued to teach, most recently as Fromm Foundation Visiting Professor at Harvard University during 2004, and at present, as a Research Professor at Cardiff University. In December 2007, she was presented with the Queen’s Medal for Music by HM The Queen and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen’s Music. In January 2008, over fifty over her works for all possible media were performed during Telling The Tale, a three-day retrospective of her music, hosted by the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Centre, London.
Judith Weir is now at work on a new opera which will receive its first performances at the Bregenzer Festspiele, Austria, in 2011. Her children’s opera Das Geheimnis der schwarzen Spinne will receive thirteen performances from the Hamburg Staatsoper in 2009.
Judith Weir’s music is published exclusively by Chester Music Ltd. and Novello and Co. Ltd.
|
|
|
|