Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade

Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade is a composer and cellist based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Composing for old, new, and damaged musical instruments, her past projects have included works for symphony orchestra, viols and theorbo, string and percussion quartets, a homemade glass harmonica, the Princeton University carillon, and a fire-damaged piano. She was recently awarded the Psappha Ensmeble’s Peter Maxwell Davies Commission for 2020/21, through which she will write a work for ensemble and sitar performed by Jasdeep Singh Degun. Current commissions also include new works for Glyndebourne Youth Opera, the 2019-20 London Symphony Orchestra’s Panufnik Scheme, the Presteigne Festival, and the Aurora Nova choir.

Ninfea is currently a composer-in-residence at Glyndebourne Opera House (2019-21). Additionally, she has participated in the Psappha Ensemble’s 2019 Composing For piano and percussion scheme and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s 2018-19 Composers’ Hub. 2019 sees the continued circulation of her work in the United States, with a performance of Hatters at the 2019 Tanglewood Music Festival, the Los Angeles premiere of The Opium-Eaters by members of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, a tour of her solo percussion composition Playchest by the Ithaca-based new music ensemble Un/Pitched, and the New York premiere of Devil’s Minion as part of the Metropolis Ensemble’s concert series. In 2018 she was commissioned to write Table Talk – a large ensemble brass work – for the Tanglewood Music Festival, and also produced multiple new works for the UK’s Lichfield Music Festival, where she was composer-in-residence.

Striving to explore familiar and unfamiliar sounds in the concert hall, Ninfea has collaborated with musicians from a range of performing traditions, including Sō Percussion, the Escher, JACK and Carducci string quartets, the early music ensembles Gallicantus and Sonnambula, steel pan player Kendall Williams, Irish sean-nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, theatre artist Rinde Eckert, and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. She was a recipient of a composition fellowship from the Tanglewood Music Center (2017) and was awarded the UK’s Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize, through which she was commissioned to write a work for the 2016 Presteigne Festival.

Trained in cello performance and the academic study of music, Ninfea holds degrees from the University of Oxford and the Royal Academy of Music, London. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University, where her teachers include Steven Mackey, Donnacha Dennehy, and Daniel Trueman. Her operatic monodrama based on the life of the 1890s art nouveau illustrator Aubrey Beardsley was recently filmed and will be shared online in 2019.