Patrick Hawes

England's Patrick Hawes belongs to the circle of present-day composers who create tonal works within a fundamentally Romantic lineage. He differentiates himself via the pronounced Christian emphasis running through much of his output and by issuing recordings under his own name instead of depending on programming decisions made by others.

Born December 5, 1958, in the North Sea port of Grimsby, Hawes studied organ as his principal subject at St. Chad's College, University of Durham, before entering a boarding-school teaching career that began at Pangbourne College and continued when he moved to Charterhouse School as composer-in-residence. The 1990 performance of his cantata The Wedding at Cana at Pangbourne affirmed his wish to devote himself to composition, leading him in the early 2000s to resign from teaching and concentrate exclusively on writing. Momentum built rapidly after that step. In 2002 he was engaged to score the film The Incredible Mrs. Ritchie. Its Pavane appeared on his first album, Blue in Blue, released in 2003 on Black Box and named CD of the Week by the Classic FM network. The recording earned a Classical Brit Award nomination and was soon voted by listeners into the network's Hall of Fame. One track, Quanta qualia, has remained among Hawes' most enduring pieces; soprano Hayley Westenra recorded a version for her 2005 album Odyssey.

These successes brought Hawes a Classic FM composer-in-residence appointment for 2006 and 2007 plus another popular release, Towards the Light. In addition to issuing his own albums he has toured in support of them, appearing at the keyboard. Growing visibility attracted notable collaborators, among them the English Chamber Orchestra and soprano Elin Manahan Thomas, for the album Fair Albion: Visions of England. He received the high-profile commission from then Prince Charles that produced The Highgrove Suite for harp and strings (2009), each movement evoking a section of the prince's gardens at Highgrove House.

Throughout the 2010s Hawes has composed several large-scale works while continuing to release albums under his own direction. He has cultivated an audience in North America, writing the Te Deum for the 2011 Lancaster Festival in Ohio and preparing a 2017 album of reflective, stylistically atypical settings of texts from the Book of Revelations for the Elora Singers. The choral piece Eventide: In Memoriam Edith Cavell (2014) commemorated the service of the noted World War I nurse. He followed it with a clarinet concerto for Emma Johnson in 2015 and with another major work tied to the World War I centenary, The Great War Symphony, which received its premiere in fall 2018; the recording quickly reached the top of the classical charts and remained there for several weeks. The 2023 release Patrick Hawes: The Nativity featured New England's Voce chamber choir. Hawes has frequently collaborated with his brother Andrew Hawes, a poet. In contrast to John Rutter, with whom he has been compared, his settings of Christian texts arise from personal religious faith. Hawes makes his home near the coast in England's Norfolk region.