FABER MUSIC - Key Persons

The founding composer of Faber Music, Benjamin Britten is a central figure in this history of British music. Blessed with tremendous imagination and facility he composed across all genres, though vocal music was always a central preoccupation. One of Britten's greatest achievements was the reinvigoration of the English-language opera tradition with works like Death in Venice, many of which are now firmly established in the international repertoire.

Job Titles:

• Administrator of the Holst Foundation

Underpinning the rich stylistic diversity of Colin Matthews's work is an unparalleled sense of architecture, combining a forensic attention to detail with a lucid sense of overall form. A master-orchestrator at the heart at the very heart of British New Music. Colin Matthews was born in London in 1946. He studied music at the Universities of Nottingham, and Sussex, where he also taught, and subsequently worked as assistant to Benjamin Britten from 1972 - 6, and with Imogen Holst from 1971 - 84. He collaborated with Deryck Cooke on the performing version of Mahler's Tenth Symphony. Since the early 1970s his music, ranging from solo piano pieces through four string quartets and many ensemble and orchestral works, has been played worldwide, with recordings on Unicorn, Virgin, Collins Classics, Deutsche Grammophon/Decca, Hallé, Naxos and NMC. From 1992-9 he was Associate Composer with the London Symphony Orchestra, writing amongst other works his 2nd Cello Concerto, for Rostropovich. In 1997 his choral/orchestral Renewal, commissioned for the 50th anniversary of BBC Radio 3, was given a Royal Philharmonic Society Award. His ballet score Hidden Variables opened the Royal Ballet's 1999/2000 season, and the large-scale ensemble piece Continuum was toured in Europe by the BCMG and Simon Rattle in 2000. Recent works include Reflected Images for the San Francisco SO, Berceuse for Dresden for the New York Philharmonic, Turning Point for the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and a Violin Concerto for Leila Josefowicz and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He was Associate Composer from 2001 -10, and is now Composer Emeritus, with the Hallé, for whom he completed his orchestration of Debussy's 24 Preludes in 2007; Alphabicycle Order was premiered by the Hallé at the 2007 Manchester International Festival. Night Rides, commissioned by the London Sinfonietta was premiered in May 2011. No Man's Land, commissioned by the City of London Sinfonia in memory of Richard Hickox was given in the 2011 Proms, and Grand Barcarolle by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and Riccardo Chailly in autumn 2011. Matthews' 4th String Quartet was written for the Elias Quartet in 2012; Traces Remain was commissioned by the BBCSO and first performed in 2014, and Spiralling by Spira Mirabilis at Aldeburgh in October 2014. The Pied Piper, a collaboration with Michael Morpurgo, was performed by the LPO in February 2015. Colin Matthews is active as administrator of the Holst Foundation, chair of the Britten Estate, and is a founder trustee and Music Director of the Britten-Pears Foundation. He was a Council Member of the Aldeburgh Foundation from 1983 - 94, and retains close links with the Aldeburgh Festival and the Britten-Pears Young Artists Programme, particularly as co-director with Oliver Knussen of the Contemporary Composition and Performance Course, which they founded in 1992. He was for many years a member of the Council of the Society for the Promotion of New Music, and a director of the Performing Right Society from 1992-5. Since 1985 he has been a member of the Music Panel of the Radclffe Trust. He has been a Council Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society since 2005, and currently sits on its Executive Committee. He is founder and Executive Producer of NMC Recordings, and has also produced recordings for many other major labels. In 1998 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Nottingham, where he holds the post of Special Professor. He is currently Prince Consort Professor of Music and Fellow of the Royal College of Music, a Fellow of the Royal Northern College of Music, where he was a Governor from 2001-2008, and Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Composition at the University of Manchester. He was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music in 2010. He was presented with the RPS/PRS Leslie Boosey Award in 2005, and was appointed OBE in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to music.

One of the leading symphonists of our time, David Matthews is preoccupied with working in the great inherited forms of the past and the task of finding new ways to renew them. The natural world provides him with a constant source of inspiration.

US composer and clarinettist Derek Bermel has been widely hailed for his creativity, theatricality, and virtuosity. His ongoing engagement with other musical cultures has become part of the fabric and force of his compositional language, in which the human voice and its myriad inflections play a primary role. Artistic Director of the American Composers Orchestra, Bermel is also curator of the Gamper Festival at the Bowdoin International Music Festival, Director of Copland House's CULTIVATE emerging composers institute, and recently enjoyed a four-year tenure as artist-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton. He has become recognized as a dynamic and unconventional curator, notably via the 2011 and 2015 SONiC Festival in New York, featuring music by over 200 young composers at venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to Joe's Pub. An innovative educator, Bermel was the Founding Director of the New York Youth Symphony's Making Score program, an intensive composition seminar exploring composition and orchestration. He has led master classes and held residencies at Yale University, University of Michigan, Longy School of Music, Peabody Institute, Faculdade de Santa Marcelina, Beijing Central Conservatory, Mannes The New School, Shanghai Conservatory, Columbia University, Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, New England Conservatory, Rhode Island School of Design, Rotterdam Conservatorium, University of Cardiff, USC, Curtis School of Music, University of Chicago, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Universita Federal da Bahia, UCLA, Adolf Fredriks Musikklasse, Northwestern University, Aspen School of Music, Bowdoin Festival of Music, Cal Arts, Tanglewood Music Center, and many more.

Job Titles:

• Co - Founder of the Renowned Games Company the Chinese Room
• S Choral - Orchestral Echo to Launch at Alexandra Palace

As well as being an acclaimed composer across many genres, Jessica is co-founder of the renowned games company The Chinese Room. Her score for the studio's acclaimed PS4 title Everybody's Gone to the Rapture has won multiple awards, including Best Music at the 2016 BAFTAs. Jessica is much admired as a choral composer. Jessica Curry is an internationally acclaimed BAFTA-winning composer of contemporary classical music and is also co-founder of renowned games company The Chinese Room. Her work has been performed in diverse and high-profile venues such as The Old Vic Tunnels, The Barbican, Sydney Opera House, The Royal Albert Hall, Great Ormond Street Hospital, The Wellcome Trust, MOMI New York, The Royal Opera House, Sage Gateshead and Durham Cathedral. The Washington Post have described her music as "stupendous" and The Guardian praised her "gorgeous orchestral score" for Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. The Rapture score has been voted in to the Classic FM Hall of Fame for several years. Jessica's music has had extensive airplay on Radio 3 and Classic FM, as well as on radio stations and in concert halls around the world. She wrote the music for the genre-defying Dear Esther, which won awards for Best Audio at the TIGA's, a GANG award and nominations for Best Audio at the BAFTAs. The music went on a worldwide orchestral tour as part of 'Replay: Symphony of Heroes'. The sold-out 'Dear Esther Live', where the game is played real-time alongside musicians and BAFTA nominated actor Oliver Dimsdale, premiered at The Barbican to great acclaim, went on a national tour of the country's finest concert halls and then toured internationally. The recipient of a PRSF Women Make Music grant, Jessica's large scale choral and brass band work, The Durham Hymns, (a collaboration with Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy) premiered at Durham Cathedral. Jessica was awarded the Outstanding Contribution award at Women in Games in 2018. She was also a finalist in the Hospital Club awards in the Games and Creative Industry categories 2017. Jessica Curry's new choral-orchestral setting of Christina Rossetti is to premiere in London's Alexandra Palace Theatre

Job Titles:

• Programmer

Julian Anderson is one of the leading composers of his generation, with an output characterised by vivid imagination, a powerful dramatic sense, and exuberant, rapturous intensity. ​ 'Anderson really is a composer to cherish' The Times Julian Anderson is one of the most talented composers of his generation and has been commissioned by organisations including the Berliner Philharmoniker, Boston Symphony, Bergen Philharmonic and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Born in London in 1967, he studied with John Lambert, Alexander Goehr and Tristan Murail and first came to prominence when his orchestral Diptych (1990) won the RPS Composition Prize in 1992. Anderson has held Composer in Residence positions with the City of Birmingham Symphony, Cleveland and London Philharmonic orchestras, relationships which produced an impressive body of orchestral works including Stations of the Sun (1998, a BBC Proms Commission) and Eden (2005, Cheltenham Festival). Fantasias (2009), written for the Cleveland Orchestra, won a British Composer Award and The Discovery of Heaven (2011), a co-commission by the New York Philharmonic and the London Philharmonic Orchestra was awarded a South Bank Sky Arts Award. Both works were recorded by the LPO live label. Anderson's first opera, Thebans, with a libretto by playwright Frank McGuinness based on the Sophocles' Theban plays, premiered at English National Opera in May 2014 in a production by Pierre Audi and received its German premiere in Bonn in May 2015. Book of Hours for ensemble and electronics (2004, a commission from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group) won the 2006 RPS Award for Large Scale Composition and featured on a NMC portrait disc. This was one of two recordings of his music to be nominated for a 2007 Gramophone Award, the other being the eventual winner, Alhambra Fantasy (Ondine). Poetry Nearing Silence (1997), originally a commission from the Nash Ensemble, was later arranged to become a successful ballet choreographed by Mark Baldwin. In 2009, Anderson and Baldwin collaborated again on a Darwin-inspired ballet, The Comedy of Change, which toured nationally with Rambert. Anderson is an active composer of choral works. His Four American Choruses (2003) were premiered at the Concertgebouw by the Netherlands Radio Choir and Bell Mass (2010) was written for the Choir of Westminster Abbey and James O'Donnell. In 2011, Anderson was a double winner at the British Composer Awards with Bell Mass winning in the liturgical category and Fantasias taking the orchestral prize. His 2006 oratorio Heaven is Shy of Earth (rev. 2009) - premiered at the BBC Proms, and subsequently released through Ondine, was awarded the BASCA award for Choral Composition in 2007. Alleluia for choir and orchestra (2007) was written to open the newly refurbished Royal Festival Hall, whilst Harmony was commissioned for the First Night of the BBC Proms 2013. A disc of his choral works, recorded by the Choir of Gonville and Caius College, was released on Delphian in 2017. Renowned as a teacher and programmer Anderson has held senior professorships at the Royal College of Music, London (1996-2004, where he was Head of Department for five years) and at Harvard University (2004-7), and is currently Professor of Composition and Composer in Residence at Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Former students include Huw Watkins, Daniel Kidane, Helen Grime, Mark Simpson, Hannah Kendall, Donghoon Shin, Ulrich Kreppein, Christopher Trapani, Han Lash and Edmund Finnis. He was Artistic Director of the Philharmonia's Music of Today series from 2002 to 2011 and in 2012 he was appointed Vice President of the Conseil Musical de la Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco.

Job Titles:

• Author
• Includes Media
• Violin Technique in Practice ( Instrumental Solo )

Mary Cohen has an international reputation as an educational composer with over sixty publications for strings in print, and her music is set by the major examining bodies worldwide. Mary is well-known for her thorough pedagogic approach; from absolute beginner through to the advanced player. Mary Cohen studied violin, piano, chamber music and composition at the Royal College of Music, where she won many major prizes. After several years in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, she set up the teaching practice that has become a research base for her educational projects. As well as violin and piano, she also plays the viola and cello. Mary gives seminars regularly both in the UK and abroad. Since 2001 she has worked for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music on their innovative Music Medals project, both as technical consultant and composer. Passionate about chamber music, Mary introduces it from the very first term of instrumental lessons, recognising both the value of new skills and of social music-making. She founded String Quartets From Scratch (SQFS), a club for chamber music for 7 -18 year olds, for which she has written a great deal of ensemble material, resulting in such publications as the Quartetstart series. Mary believes that learning to play an instrument should be set in the context of a broad musical experience, and that each pupil has a unique personal learning style that should be encouraged to flourish. Her publications for the early stages are designed to have instant appeal for children of primary school age, with lots of humour and an easily digestible progression of new techniques to learn. The acclaimed Superseries has transformed modern teaching methods while bringing huge amounts of enjoyment to countless student string players. Author Mary Cohen talks about her new book for violinists, Violin Technique in Practice Mary Cohen writes about a recent visit to Trento, Italy, where she lead a weekend of workshops with students.

One of the most performed of all contemporary American composers, multiple Grammy Award-winning Michael Daugherty's vibrant music is often inspired by American icons as diverse as Superman, Rosa Parks, Ernest Hemingway and the Rio Grande.

One of the best-known British composers of the 20th century, Malcolm Arnold was a true eclectic, composing everything from symphonies and ballets to concertos and film scores. His music is constantly​ engaging and directly communicative, but behind the popular image of Arnold is a much more complex personality, with a remarkably rich output to match. ​ Sir Malcolm Arnold was born in Northampton on 21st October 1921. His early musical influences came from his mother, a fine amateur pianist and, later, from writing and improvising jazz with his brother and friends. A lover of the music of trumpeter Louis Armstrong, after meeting him on a family holiday at the Royal Bath Hotel at Bournemouth where he played at a tea dance, Arnold took up the trumpet at the age of twelve and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music at sixteen, studying trumpet with Ernest Hall and composition with Gordon Jacob. It was during his second year of study, having already won second prize in the Cobbett Prize for composition, that he left the Royal College of Music on an invitation to join the London Philharmonic Orchestra as second trumpet. Promotion to principal soon followed and Arnold swiftly became acknowledged as one of the great trumpeters of the age. During his time with the LPO he composed prolifically, all the while honing his skills as an orchestrator, learning the symphonic repertoire from the inside. Apart from two years military service during the war, he remained with the LPO until 1948, apart from a brief spell with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra when he first left the army. In that year he won the Mendelssohn Scholarship and abandoned professional playing for good in favour of composition. From 1948 until the early sixties, Arnold composed at a tremendous rate. Commissions flooded in and he became known as one of the most sought-after composers of the time, alongside Benjamin Britten and William Walton. The Third, Fourth and Fifth Symphonies were commissioned and composed during this time, and Arnold wrote concertos and sonatas for players he particularly admired, including the Guitar Concerto for Julian Bream. Arnold's role as a conductor of his works, both in the concert hall and in the studio for films and recordings, increased at this time and he was composing film scores at the rate of six per year. This hectic pace of life, however, could not be sustained for long and the early sixties saw a period of depression for Arnold and the breakdown of his marriage. In the mid-sixties, he moved to Cornwall where he settled until 1972 with his second wife, becoming closely involved in Cornish musical life. He was made a Bard of the Cornish Gorsedd in 1968 and was awarded the CBE two years later. Some fine works, including the Cornish Dances (1966), Sixth Symphony (1967), The Padstow Lifeboat, Viola Concerto (1971) and the Concerto for Two Pianos (Three Hands) (1969), were composed in Cornwall, and during this time he composed in response to commissions from some of the leading performers in the country. In 1972 Arnold moved with his family to Dublin, where he remained until 1977. The Seventh Symphony (1973), Clarinet Concerto No 2 (1974) and the Fantasy on a Theme of John Field (1975) all belong to the Irish years. String Quartet No 2 (1975), composed for the Allegri Quartet, contains an Irish jig, and music with an Irish flavour can be heard in the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies. In 1977 Arnold returned to England after the break-up of his second marriage. During the next seven years he spent two short periods in hospital and only completed three works: the Symphony for Brass (1978), the Trumpet Concerto (1982) and the Eighth Symphony (1978). A return to health marked his move to Norfolk in 1984. Once more, in a settled and secure environment, he returned to writing, producing a Recorder Concerto (1988) for Michaela Petri, the Irish Dances (1986) and the Ninth Symphony, as well as a Fantasy for Cello (1987) and Cello Concerto for Julian Lloyd-Webber Recognition and awards followed: in 1986 the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Services to British Music, in 1989 a Doctorate of Music from Miami University, Oxford Ohio, and a Knighthood in 1993. In October 2001 Sir Malcolm was awarded a Fellowship of the British Academy of Songwriters and Composers on the occasion of a special 80th birthday concert at the Wigmore Hall. In 2004 he was also honoured with the Incorporated Society of Musician's Distinguished Musician Award "for his lifetime's achievements as one of the greatest composers of the 20th century." In 1989 he received the Freedom of Northampton. Following a brief illness, Sir Malcolm died in Norwich on 23 September 2006, on the evening that a ballet production by the Northern Ballet Theatre, The Three Musketeers, premiered in Bradford. Several events had already been planned to celebrate his 85th birthday, including the inaugural Malcolm Arnold Festival in Northampton. 2021, the centenary of Arnold's birth, provides the ideal opportunity to reassess this fascinating and indispensable figure in British Music