Richard Causton

Richard Causton was born in London in 1971 and studied at the University of York and the Royal College of Music. He has worked with performers such as the BBC Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Sinfonieorchester Basel, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrücken, London Sinfonietta and the Nash Ensemble.

In May 1997 he was awarded the Mendelssohn Scholarship in its 150th anniversary year, as a result of which he studied with Franco Donatoni and Giovanni Cospito at the Scuola Civica di Musica, Milan.

The Persistence of Memory (1995) was premièred by Oliver Knussen and the London Sinfonietta at the South Bank Centre and later won the Third International ‘Nuove Sincronie’ Composition Competition. In October 1999 it was performed in the ICSM World Music Days in Chişinău, Moldova. Other distinctions include the SPNM George Butterworth Award for the solo piano work, Non mi comporto male (1993), and the Fast Forward composition award for Two Pieces for two clarinets (1995).

In 2003-5, Causton was Fellow in the Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge. Seven States of Rain, composed for Darragh Morgan (violin) and Mary Dullea (piano), won the Best Instrumental Work category of the 2004 British Composer Awards, and the same year Between Two Waves of the Sea, a large scale orchestral work, was premiered by the CBSO at Symphony Hall, Birmingham. 2006-7 saw premieres of new works for Caius College Choir, Cambridge (Jesu, sweetė sonė dear), the New London Children’s Choir (Three Riddles), the Aldeburgh Festival (Saraband/The Way the World Ends), the London Sinfonietta (Phoenix) and the Britten Sinfonia (As Kingfishers Catch Fire).

Causton’s Phoenix was the winner of the 2006 Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Chamber-Scale Composition and a recording is available on the fourth disc in the London Sinfonietta label's Jerwood series. His latest large-scale works are the Chamber Symphony, commissioned by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Nocturne for 21 Pianos, premiered at the 2010 City of London Festival.