Richard Blackford

Richard Blackford has earned particular renown through his output in theatrical idioms, among them opera, choral-orchestral compositions, and more than two hundred scores for film and television. He has also produced several musicals.

Born in London on January 13, 1954, Blackford studied at the Royal College of Music, where John Lambert taught him composition and he likewise pursued conducting. A scholarship took him to Italy for several years, during which he assisted Hans Werner Henze and absorbed the thinking of the continental avant-garde. Returning to England in 1977, he joined the faculty of the London Academy of Musical and Dramatic Art while fulfilling commissions for theater music and concert pieces. He became the first composer-in-residence at Baillol College at Oxford University; in that post he was asked to write Metamorphosis, the earliest of his four operas, for the centenary of his alma mater. Blackford has also created two stage musicals and incidental music for numerous productions, including two mounted by London’s Royal National Theatre: The Prince’s Play and Fram. He has supplied roughly two hundred film and television scores, an achievement recognized by an Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2001.

Among his choral works stands Not in Our Time, given its premiere in 2011 on the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. His concert music includes The Great Animal Orchestra (2014), which integrates recordings of gibbons, humpback whales, Pacific tree frogs, mountain gorillas, beavers, and a wren, as well as Niobe (2017), commissioned by the Czech Philharmonic and first performed by Tamsin Waley-Cohen.

Some twenty of his compositions have been recorded, among them The Great Animal Orchestra, which appeared alongside Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals on a 2014 release by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. His choral score Mirror of Perfection exists in multiple major recordings. Blackford’s Pietà (2019) received the 2020 Ivor Novello Award in the choral-music category, and he has been honored with additional distinctions, including the 2015 Das goldene Deutschland for his services to music in Germany.