Eleanor Alberga

Among the most prominent contemporary composers with Caribbean origins, Eleanor Alberga grew up and was partly trained in Jamaica. She lives in Britain and has had important careers as both composer and pianist. Alberga was born in Kingston, Jamaica, then part of the British West Indies, in 1949. She took up the piano at age five, and by ten, she was writing her own compositions. As a student, Alberga also played the guitar and accompanied the Jamaican Folk Singers vocal group. She attended the Jamaica School of Music in Kingston, and in 1970, she won the West Indian Associated Board Scholarship, which enabled her to travel to London and enroll at the Royal Academy of Music. There, she studied with composer Richard Stoker and continued her piano studies, launching a career as a concert pianist upon her graduation. Alberga was a finalist at the International Piano Concerto Competition in Dudley, England, in 1974. A unique feature of her career as a pianist is its intersection with the world of dance; in 1978, she became the pianist at the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, and she was later named the company's artistic director. She led famous improvisatory sessions there and wrote music for the group. Alberga also performed with her husband, violinist Thomas Bowes, in a duo called Double Exposure. Alberga's compositions began to appear more frequently in the 1980s and '90s, and her works were performed by such groups as the Royal Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic, and the London Mozart Players. Her music has been heard outside of Britain in the U.S., Australia, Canada, continental Europe, and China, among other countries. She has written orchestral works, chamber music, keyboard, choral, and vocal works, and a pair of operas, Market of the Dead (1987, based on a story by Isabel Allende) and Letters of a Love Betrayed (2009). Alberga's music is tonal, although it has grown more dissonant later in her career, and draws on sources including Jamaican folk music and jazz. Two of Alberga's most famous works are Roald Dahl's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," for narrators and orchestra (1994), commissioned by the Roald Dahl Foundation and often performed in schools, and Arise, Athena! for chorus, which set a text of her own and opened the last night of the BBC Proms in 2015. Roald Dahl's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" was recorded in 2011 with Danny DeVito, Griff Rhys Jones, and Joanna Lumley as narrators. Alberga ended her career as a pianist in 2001 and has since devoted full time to composition. By the early 2020s, more than a dozen of her compositions had been recorded, including all three of her string quartets and both of her violin concertos.
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