Rhian Samuel

Rhian Samuel was born in Aberdare, Wales, in 1944. Her orchestral music includes Elegy-Symphony (St Louis SO, Leonard Slatkin, 1981), La Belle Dame sans Merci for chorus and orchestra (co-winner, ASCAP/Rudolph Nissim Award, USA, 1983), and Tirluniau/Landscapes, commissioned by the BBC for the Millennium Proms at the Albert Hall, London.

Clytemnestra for soprano and orchestra (1994) appears on a BIS CD with Ruby Hughes, soprano, BBCNOW and Jac van Steen, conductor, which was short-listed for a Gramophone Award in 2020. She has written seven song-cycles for voice and piano commissioned by prestigious British music festivals, including Cerddi Hynafol /Ancient Songs (2001), Wildflower Songbook (2015), A Swift Radiant Morning (2015) and The Moon and I (2022). Her works for voice with early instruments include A River (2007) and Orpheus (2020). A teacher as well as a composer, she completed a PhD at Washington University, St Louis, in 1977 with a study of the 16 th - century chanson and taught at the St Louis Conservatory of Music.

She returned to the UK in 1984, teaching at Reading University, then City University London, where she is now Professor Emeritus, and Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Rhian Samuel is co-editor of the New Grove/Norton Dictionary of Women Composers (1994) and has published articles on several of the operas of Harrison Birtwistle. She now composes full-time at her home in Aberdyfi, north Wales.