Eleanor Alberga

With her 2015 BBC Last Night of the Proms opener ARISE ATHENA! Eleanor Alberga cemented a reputation as a composer of international stature.  Performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Chorus and conducted by Marin Alsop, the work was heard and seen by millions.

The musical language of her opera LETTERS OF A LOVE BETRAYED (2009), premiered at London’s Royal Opera House Linbury stage, drew comparison with Berg’s Wozzeck and Debussy’s Pelleas, while her lighter works draw more obviously on her Jamaican heritage and time as a singer with the Jamaican Folk Singers and as a member of an African Dance company.  But the emotional range of her language, her structural clarity and a fabulously assured technique as an orchestrator have always drawn high praise.

Born 1949 in Kingston, Jamaica, Alberga decided at the age of five to be a concert pianist, though five years later she was already composing works for the piano. 

In 1970 she won the biennial Royal Schools of Music Scholarship for the West Indies which she took up at the Royal Academy of Music in London, studying piano and singing.  But a budding career as a solo pianist - she was was one of 3 finalists in the International Piano Concerto Competition in Dudley, UK in 1974 - was augmented by composition with her arrival at The London Contemporary Dance Theatre in 1978.  Under the inspirational leadership of its Artistic Director Robert Cohan, she became one of the very few pianists with the deepest understanding of modern dance and her company class improvisations became the stuff of legend.  These in turn led to works commissioned and conceived for dance from the company, most notably the piano quintet CLOUDS (1984).  Alberga later became the company’s Musical Director, conducting, composing and playing on LCDT’s many tours.

The orchestral works, SUN WARRIOR (1990) written for the inaugural Women in Music Festival, and her dramatic adaptation of Roald Dahl’s SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARVES (1994) for large symphony orchestra and narrators, premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in 1994 with Franz Welser Möst and the London Philharmonic, helped build her growing reputation. In 2001 she was awarded a NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) Fellowship for composition.  

2001 also saw the completion and premiere of a highly praised first VIOLIN CONCERTO, written for Thomas Bowes and commissioned by The Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Joseph Swensen.  

Chamber music, both in the more traditional form of three String Quartets and a Piano Quintet, and for more unusual line-ups, abounds.  An unfolding series of Nocturnes  - notably, SHINING GATE OF MORPHEUS and SUCCUBUS MOON - featuring horn and oboe respectively with string quartet, is an expanding project.  Works for voice have more recently come to the fore with a luminous setting of George Herbert’s THE GLIMPSE and the song cycle THE SOUL’S EXPRESSION to poetry by George Eliot, Emily Bronte and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; both were premiered by the baritone Jeremy Huw Williams.  The choral work MY HEART DANCETH (2007) is a setting of Psalm 28.

Other more recent commissions and works include the cello solo for Robert Irvine RIDE THROUGH; GLACIER, for mixed ensemble, and the piano solo OH CHACONNE! conceived as a prelude to the Bach-Busoni Chaconne for which she played in its original form as the dance piece ‘Lingua Franca’, choreographed by Robert Cohan on his 90th birthday.  The orchestral piece TOWER for the London Mozart Players received its premiere in October 2017. 

August 2019 saw the premiere of a commission from the Dartington International Festival; AWED LIGHT ITS CHANT ENTRANCES - text by Alice Oswald, it was performed by the festival’s Artistic Director, pianist Joanna MacGregor, and the festival choir.  

Alberga is currently working on a second VIOLIN CONCERTO, premiering in Wroclaw, Poland March 2020 again for Thomas Bowes.  Other emerging projects include a Symphony, a second Opera and a trumpet concerto.

A recording of her three string quartets was released on the Navona label of PARMA Recordings in June 2019.

Still active as a pianist she will, with violinist and husband Thomas Bowes, make a tour of China in November 2019 as the duo Double Exposure.  In April 2020 her work will be featured with the New York based Orchestra of St Luke’s in a series of concerts across the city, ‘Music in Color’.