Robert Saxton has been the Composer in Association at The Purcell School since 2013. He works primarily with composition students but also feeds into the wider work of the School and the artistic programme.
Over the course of 2020-21, Robert will contribute three or four separate projects and continue to support the future planning of the School’s artistic programme.
We are enormously grateful to Robert for his generous support over many years as Composer in Association, and look forward to many more.
Biography
After early advice from Benjamin Britten, Robert Saxton (b.1953) studied with Elisabeth Lutyens, Robin Holloway and Luciano Berio. He read Music at Cambridge and was then a postgraduate at Oxford. He won First Prize in 1975 at the Gaudeamus Composition Competition in Holland and was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton USA as recipient of the Fulbright/Schirmer Award (1985-86).
He was Head of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and then the Royal Academy of Music (London). He is Emeritus Professor at Oxford University, Hon Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, Hon Research Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and Composer-in-Association at The Purcell School.
Selected commissions include works for the BBC (Proms, TV and radio), the ECO, ESO and Kenneth Woods, LSO, LPO, London Sinfonietta, Nash Ensemble, Opera North, St Paul’s Sinfonia and Andrew Morley, Aldeburgh, Cheltenham, Leeds, Lichfield and Presteigne festivals and for the Arditti, Chilingirian and Kreutzer string quartets, Richard Rodney Bennett and Susan Bradshaw, Teresa Cahill, Fidelio Piano Trio, Leon Fleisher, Clare Hammond, Steven Isserlis, Mstislav Rostropovich, Clerks Group, Christ Church Cathedral Oxford, Peter Sheppard-Skaeverd, James Turnbull, John Wallace, Raphael Wallfisch and Roderick Williams.
Works are recorded on Sony Classical, EMI, Hyperion, NMC, Divine Art/Metier andpublished by Wise Music, Ricordi (Berlin), UYMP and Viola Viva (Switzerland).
Robert is married to the soprano, Teresa Cahill. Management: Liz Webb Management