Richard Blackford

Richard Blackford is one of the most performed and recorded composers in Europe. He studied composition at the Royal College of Music with John Lambert, then with Hans Werner Henze in Rome. His music has been premiered at the BBC Proms, the Cheltenham Music Festival, Brighton Festival, Long Island Festival, the Montepulciano Cantiere d’Arte, and the Berlin and Adelaide Festivals, and performed and broadcast by orchestras including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the Czech Philharmonic, the Britten Sinfonia, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Orchestra of the Hessischer Rundfunk.

Sixteen discs of his music are recorded on the Decca, Sony Classical, Nimbus, Warner Classics, Signum and Pentatone labels. He has twice been nominated for an Ivor Novello Composer Award, winning in 2020 for his choral work Pietà.

He has written three major commissions for the Czech Philharmonic, including his Cello Concerto, The Recovery of Paradise for Alisa Weilerstein, which received a five-star review in BBC Music Magazine. Songs of Nadia Anjuman received five-star reviews in The Times and The Guardian as well, and was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award and a Sky Arts Award.

His choral works, two of which have been the subject of television documentaries, have become part of the choral repertory: Mirror of Perfection alone has been performed more than 200 times. His other awards include Die Goldene Deutschland for services to music in Germany, the Tagore Gold Medal and the Making Music Best Creator Award, and he was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Achievement in Music for his four-hour score for the BBC/CNN series Millennium.