Sally Beamish

The work is scored for the unusual combination of choir, orchestra and a concertante group consisting of countertenor, cello and trumpet.
The Lion and the Deer was first performed in Portsmouth Cathedral with the Portsmouth Grammar School Choir, the London Mozart Players, Michael Chance (countertenor), Sebastian Comberti (cello) and Paul Archibald (trumpet) in April 2008 and the recording was made immediately after the concert.

Sally Beamish is known internationally as a concert composer. She has received commissions from the USA, Japan, Australia, Scandinavia and Europe, and her music has been broadcast worldwide.

She was born in London in 1956 and started writing music and playing the piano at an early age. She later studied viola at the Royal Northern College of Music, where she also received composition lessons from Anthony Gilbert and Sir Lennox Berkeley. She went on to study in Germany with the Italian violist Bruno Giuranna.

Although she always considered herself primarily a composer, for a decade her career centred on the viola, particularly as a member of the Raphael Ensemble, with whom she made four discs of string sextets. Many opportunities to develop her compositional skills arose from her playing with the London Sinfonietta and Lontano; through this she became acquainted with many prominent composers, gaining valuable insights into their music and working methods.

In 1989 she received an Arts Council Composer’s Bursary, and moved from London to Scotland, where she and her husband, cellist Robert Irvine, founded the Chamber Group of Scotland, with co-director James MacMillan, and where Beamish’s career as a composer really began to flourish. Since moving to Scotland she has received a steady stream of commissions, and in 1994 and 1995 was Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ assistant on the SCO composers’ course in Hoy. In September 1993 she received the prestigious Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for outstanding achievement in composition.

Her orchestral output is considerable, including two symphonies (for the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and Royal Scottish National Orchestra/ LPO (respectively), and the concerto form is a continuing source of inspiration to her; she has written concertos for violin (Anthony Marwood/ BBCSSO), three for viola (Philip Dukes, Proms 1995, London Mozart Players, Tabea Zimmermann/ Swedish and Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and Lawrence Power/Scottish Ensemble), cello (Robert Cohen/Academy of St. Martin in the Fields), oboe (Douglas Boyd/ Premiere Ensemble), saxophone (John Harle/St Magnus Festival)/ Swedish Chamber Orchestra), trumpet (Håkan Hardenberger/ National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, Proms 2003, percussion (Evelyn Glennie/Tromsö Symphony Orchestra in 2004, flute (Sharon Beazly/Royal Scottish National Orchestra, 2005) and in 2006, in honour of her 50th birthday, a concerto for accordion (James Crabb/ Hallé Orchestra, at the Cheltenham Festival).

Beamish is also active in writing for non-professional forces, as well as for theatre. She has written a children’s nativity musical, as well as works for amateur strings and full orchestra, and is completing a series of works, commissioned by Children’s Classic Concerts, which feature the different sections of the orchestra. The stage musical, Shenachie, written with Donald Goodbrand Saunders, was premiered by her local amateur theatre company in 2006 and reached the finals of the Highland Quest, a Cameron Mackintosh competition with Eden Court Theatre.

Beamish was one of the first artists to win a “Creative Scotland” Award from the Scottish Arts Council, which has enabled her to develop her oratorio for the 2001 BBC Proms (Knotgrass Elegy: librettist Donald Goodbrand Saunders), premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, with Sir Andrew Davis.

She has worked for BBC Radio Manchester and Radio Scotland as a presenter of music programmes, and has written several scores for film and television, one of which won a Scottish Bafta in 2003 for Best Composer.

Her arrangements of Debussy as a Suite for Cello and Orchestra were premiered in 2007 by Steven Isserlis and the St Paul Chamber Orchestra, Minnesota, to critical acclaim.