Richard Blackford

Composer Richard Blackford is especially well known for his work in dramatic genres, including opera, choral-orchestral music, and more than 200 film and television scores. He has also written several musicals. Blackford was born in London on January 13, 1954. He attended the Royal College of Music, taking composition courses with John Lambert and also studying conducting. Winning a scholarship, Blackford spent several years in Italy as an assistant to composer Hans Werner Henze, absorbing the ideas of the continental avant-garde. In 1977, he returned to England, taking a teaching position at the London Academy of Musical and Dramatic Art while he worked on commissions for theater music and concert works. Blackford became the first-ever composer-in-residence at Baillol College at Oxford University, and during this period, he was commissioned to write Metamorphosis, the first of his four operas, for the centenary of his alma mater. Blackford has also written two stage musicals and music for many theatrical productions, including two for London's Royal National Theatre: The Prince's Play and Fram. He has composed some 200 film and television scores, and in 2001, he received an Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement in that field. Blackford's choral scores include Not in Our Time, premiered in 2011 on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. His concert music includes The Great Animal Orchestra (2014), which incorporates recordings of gibbons, humpback whales, Pacific tree frogs, mountain gorillas, beavers, and a wren, and Niobe (2017), commissioned by the Czech Philharmonic and premiered by Tamsin Waley-Cohen. Some 20 of Blackford's compositions have been recorded, including The Great Animal Orchestra, which was paired with Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals on a 2014 release by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. His choral work Mirror of Perfection has had multiple major recordings. Blackford's Pietà (2019) won the 2020 Ivor Novello Award in the choral music category, and he is the recipient of various other awards, including the 2015 Das goldene Deutschland for services to music in Germany.
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