Judith Weir composer

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.

Arthur Somervell

Sir Arthur Somervell (5 June 1863 – 2 May 1937) was an English composer, and after Hubert Parry one of the most successful and influential writers of ‘art-song’ in the English music renaissance of the 1890s-1900s.
He was born in Windermere, Westmorland, the son of the founder of K Shoes. He was educated at Uppingham School and King’s College, Cambridge studying under Sir Charles Villiers Stanford.
From 1883 to 1885 he studied at the Berlin Hochwchule, and from 1885 to 1887 at the Royal College of Music in London, under Stanford and Parry. In 1894 he became a professor at the Royal College of Music. His works were performed at the Leeds and Birmingham Festivals, 1895-97. In 1901 he was appointed Inspector of Music at the Board of Education and Scottish education.
His greatest success was a composer of choral works such as The Forsaken Merman (1895), Intimations of Immortality (which he conducted at Leeds Festival in 1907), and The Passion of Christ (1914). There are also 4 song cycles including the the setting of Tennyson’s Maud and the first known setting of A. E. Housman, 1904.
His style was unadventurous, with some influence of Mendelssohn and Brahms.
He was knighted in 1929.