Biography

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 sees performances of his acclaimed Clarinet Quintet at both the  Cheltenham Festival and Luhacovice Festival in the Czech Republic, and  the premiere of his Te Deum in Westminster Abbey on November 19th. His  cantata Mirror Of Perfection receives performances in Cologne and  Dorking, bringing the total number of performances to over eighty.  2010 also sees the commission of a major new 50 minute work for choir,  soloists and orchestra by the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus for its  Centenary. Entitled Not In Our Time it will be premiered on September  11th. 2011 in Cheltenham Town Hall under the auspices of the  Cheltenham Festival. Richard continues his collaboration with the Brno  Philharmonic and will conduct a concert of English and American music  there in May 2011.