Richard Blackford
After graduating from the Royal College of Music Richard was appointed Composer In Residence at Balliol College Oxford. His work is performed and broadcast all over the world and has been featured in the Adelaide, Cork, Montepulciano, Brighton, Cheltenham, Long Island and Berlin Festivals. It has been recorded on the Sony, Decca, Argo, Warner Classics, EMI, Quartz and Signum labels. Awards include First Prize at the Houston Film Festival, The Royal Television Society Award, the Mendelssohn Scholarship and the Tagore Gold Medal. In 2000 he wrote a four-hour choral and orchestral score for CNN/BBC Millennium, which won an Emmy Award for Best Title Sequence and for which Richard was nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Music. His collaborators include Ted Hughes, Maya Angelou, Tony Harrison and Alistair Beaton. In 2008 he became the first ever Composer in Association to the Brno Philharmonic.
Richard has written extensively for the theatre, and his credits include: The Laborers of Herakles, The Kaisers of Carnuntum (both by Tony Harrison); also The Prince's Play (National Theatre)The Pig Organ (Royal Opera House), King (Piccadilly Theatre), Follow My Leader (Birmingham Rep and Hampstead Theatre). Both of his critically acclaimed choral works Mirror Of Perfection (Sony Classical) and Voices of Exile (Quartz Records) were the subjects of television documentaries and have been frequently broadcast on Classic FM and BBC Radio 3.
His feature film credits include City of Joy, Prometheus and Song For A Raggy Boy, the latter winning eleven international film festival awards. He has composed the music for over one hundred and ten 90-minute dramas for ZDF Germany. UK TV drama credits include Fingersmith, A Little Bit Of Lippy, Summer Solstice, Ruth Rendell Mysteries, 1940s House, Family, Finding Sarah, Preston Front, The Shell Seekers, Starting Over, The Vanishing Man, Pigeon Summer, Perfect Scoundrels, and, with Tony Harrison, The Shadow Of Hiroshima, Metamorpheus and A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan.
2010 saw performances of his acclaimed Clarinet Quintet at both the Cheltenham and Luhacovice Festival in the Czech Republic, and the premiere of his Te Deum in Westminster Abbey. His cantata Mirror Of Perfection received its German premiere in Cologne, bringing the total number of performances to over eighty.
2011 saw the premiere of a major new 55-minute work for choir, orchestra and soloists commissioned by the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus for its Centenary. Entititled Not In Our TIme, it was premiered on September 11th in Cheltenham Town Hall under the auspices of the Cheltenham Festival, the tenth anniversary of 9/11.
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