Cheryl Frances-Hoad

A prodigious talent, Cheryl Frances-Hoad won the BBC Young Composer Competition in 1996 at the age of 15 and since then her works have garnered numerous prizes and awards, including the first Robert Helps International Composition Prize (2005), the Cambridge Composer’s Competition, the Birmingham Conservatoire Composition Competition, and the International String Orchestra Composition Competition.
Recent awards include, in 2007, the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize, resulting in the premiere of "My day in Hell" at the Cheltenham Music Festival by the Dante Quartet (broadcast by Radio 3), and, in 2008, a Leverhulme Trust Artists in Residence Fellowship, and the Wicklow County Council Per Cent for Arts Commission (Ireland), which allowed her to compose her first piano concerto, premiered by Bobby Chen and the Greystones Orchestra in May 2009. Her debut CD of chamber works is due to be released in 2010, and other major commissions include works for the Almeida Festival, St Magnus Festival, Tête à Tête Opera, and the Spitalfields Festival and her compositions have been heard at the Wigmore Hall and the Purcell Room. Her latest work, a 28 minute soprano and piano setting of excerpts of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, (commissioned by the BBC for the renowned soprano Elizabeth Watts) will be premiered in the Wigmore Hall in January 2011, and in September 2010 Cheryl will become the first DARE Cultural Fellow at Opera North and Leeds University in September 2010.