Biography
Dani Howard has produced an extensive catalog of compositions early in her professional life, encompassing numerous orchestral scores along with multiple operas, many of which were requested by leading ensembles across the United Kingdom and internationally. Born in 1993 in Hong Kong during its period of British administration, she displayed an early passion for music that prompted her parents to arrange drum lessons when she turned five; she later added studies in cello, piano, and guitar. At one stage she weighed a path as a professional basketball player and earned a spot as the first non-Chinese athlete on Hong Kong’s national team even though she spoke no Cantonese, though she is fluent in Mandarin. Ultimately she judged that forgoing music would bring deeper regret than leaving sport behind. Her cello instructor Richard Bamping encouraged her to envision a full-time musical vocation. From 2011 to 2015 she enrolled at London’s Royal College of Music as a Rose Williams Scholar, where Jonathan Cole served as her principal composition teacher. She reached the finals of the International Antonín Dvořák Composition Competition in Prague in both 2014 and 2015.
Soon after completing her studies, her luminous and rhythmically energetic style drew commissions from roughly forty orchestras, among them the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and five BBC ensembles. In 2017 Classic FM asked her to mark the station’s twenty-fifth anniversary with a new piece; the resulting Argentum was subsequently performed and recorded by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Additional performances have come from the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra in Indiana and the City Orchestra of Hong Kong. The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra gave the premiere of her orchestral work The Butterfly Effect in 2023. Her Trombone Concerto of 2021 appears on a 2024 Rubicon release featuring Peter Moore as soloist alongside further orchestral compositions by Howard. She has also completed two chamber operas, Robin Hood and The Yellow Wallpaper, the latter drawn from the story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Soon after completing her studies, her luminous and rhythmically energetic style drew commissions from roughly forty orchestras, among them the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and five BBC ensembles. In 2017 Classic FM asked her to mark the station’s twenty-fifth anniversary with a new piece; the resulting Argentum was subsequently performed and recorded by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Additional performances have come from the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra in Indiana and the City Orchestra of Hong Kong. The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra gave the premiere of her orchestral work The Butterfly Effect in 2023. Her Trombone Concerto of 2021 appears on a 2024 Rubicon release featuring Peter Moore as soloist alongside further orchestral compositions by Howard. She has also completed two chamber operas, Robin Hood and The Yellow Wallpaper, the latter drawn from the story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.