Michael Berkeley

• Mini-Drama

Michael Berkeley was born in 1948, the eldest son of the composer Sir Lennox Berkeley. As a chorister at Westminster Cathedral, singing naturally played an important part in his early education and as a treble he worked frequently with his godfather, Benjamin Britten. He studied composition, singing, and piano at the Royal Academy of Music but it was not until his late twenties, when he went to study with Richard Rodney Bennett, that Berkeley began to concentrate exclusively on composition. The first few works from this period, including a group of Latin motets, the String Trio and the Oboe Concerto, were written in a broadly tonal idiom and attracted considerable attention. In 1977 he was awarded the Guinness Prize for Composition; two years later he was appointed Associate Composer to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

The climax of this first period came in 1982 with the oratorio Or Shall We Die? to a text specially written by Ian McEwan and made into a remarkable film for Channel 4 by Richard Eyre.

Since then Berkeley’s music has undergone a very considerable change and in pieces like For the Savage Messiah (1985), Songs of Awakening Love (1986) (composed for Heather Harper and performed at the 1988 Proms) and the Organ Concerto (1987) his language became more distinctive with the emotional quality of the early pieces integrated into a tauter musical idiom. A harder edged sound began to emerge in works like Keening for the saxophonist John Harle, Fierce Tears I and II for the oboist Nicholas Daniel, the Quartet Study which was performed by the Arditti Quartet at the 1989 Almeida Festival, and the two string pieces Coronach and Gethsemani Fragment.

In early 1991 the first performance of a BBC commission from Lontano, Entertaining Master Punch, revealed a richly coloured and moving score, and this work together with the Clarinet Concerto, written for Emma Johnson, was highly praised. The opera Baa Baa Black Sheep, based on the childhood of Rudyard Kipling, with a libretto by David Malouf, was premiered at the Cheltenham Festival to enormous public and critical acclaim in 1993. It was subsequently broadcast by BBC radio and television, and recorded on CD by Collins Classics. Since then a number of highly successful but contrasting works have further consolidated Berkeley’s growing reputation: the Viola Concerto written for the Philharmonia Orchestra and given its London premiere under Leonard Slatkin; Catch Me If You Can for the Haffner Wind Ensemble of London; Magnetic Field for the Vanbrugh String Quartet; and Winter Fragments for the Nash Ensemble.

Berkeley’s recent projects include a string quartet, Torque & Velocity, premiered by the Takacs String Quartet in 1997, which is closely related to his previous quartet, Magnetic Field. It is an explosive and exciting essay in the dynamics of rhythm and was written with the Takacs’s strengths particularly in mind. In January 1998 Secret Garden was premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis at the Barbican Hall. A joint commission from the LSO and OUP, Secret Garden received great critical acclaim and has since been played in Europe and Israel. Also receiving universal acclaim, The Garden of Earthly Delights, a twenty-minute orchestral piece commissioned by the BBC for the 1998 Proms, was premiered by the National Youth Orchestra conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich in August 1998. Berkeley was a featured composer in the 1999 Båstad Chamber Music Festival in Sweden.

Berkeley’s second opera, Jane Eyre, written to David Malouf’s libretto, was premiered on 30 June 2000 at the Cheltenham Festival by Music Theatre Wales and was subsequently toured around the UK.
2003 saw Berkeley's music reaching an international audience, with performances of Odd Man Out and Entertaining Master Punch at the Sydney Festival, Australia, and the US premiere of the Chamber Symphony in New York. New works include a string quintet, Abstract Mirror, for the Chilingirian String Quartet and Stephen Orton, cello, and Gethsemane - A Sacred Scena for tenor and ensemble, which was written for the Nash Ensemble. His Concerto for Orchestra was premiered by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales at the BBC Proms in 2005, under Richard Hickox
Berkeley is Composer-in-Association with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. He also acts as Visiting Professor in Composition at the Welsh College of Music and Drama.