Errollyn Wallen

Errollyn Wallen’s output includes twenty operas and two large scale works for the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games for London 2012 broadcast to a billion people around the world.

Her latest large scale work, THIS FRAME IS PART OF THE PAINTING for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, is a BBC Proms commission for 2019 and was performed by BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Elim Chan, to a sold out Royal Albert Hall.

Her new chamber opera THE POWDER MONKEY recently finished a tour including a performance at the Royal National Maritime Museum and she is working on an opera, After Winter for Streetwise and an opera commissioned by GRAEAE.

Her Concerto Grosso is released on the NMC label January 2020, performed by Chineke! who also premièred the chamber work NNENNA, at the Cambridge Music Festival in 2018, and gave its London première at Wigmore Hall in 2019. The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge have recorded her music for a forthcoming release and performed PACE on their recent Australian tour.

Her opera The Silent Twins (libretto by April De Angelis) will receive its US première in New York in 2022. Her arrangement of Johnetta Bryant’s song, I’m a Young Black Man (composed in response to George Floyd’s murder) for Clean Bandit and Friends has received over 63,000 views on YouTube. It features Grace Chatto, Sheku and Braimah Kanneh-Mason, Nicola and Stephanie Benedetti.

Other works in progress include a piano concerto and a new opera, Dido’s Ghost, commissioned by Dunedin Consrort and the Barbican Errollyn Wallen’s albums include: ERROLLYN, The Girl in My Alphabet, Meet Me at Harold Moores. These have travelled 7.84 million kilometres in space, completing 186 orbits around the Earth on NASA’s STS115 mission.

Errollyn was awarded the MBE in 2007 and was made a CBE in the New Year Honours List.

In 2015 she became an Honorary Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford and in 2019 an Honorary Fellow of Goldsmiths, London.  She has received an Ivor Novello Award for Classical Music, a British Composer Award and a FIPA D’Or for Best Music for a Television Series. These honours come with further garnishes: an Honorary Doctorate from York St. John’s University, one of BBC’s 100 Women 2018 and one of London University’s 150 Leading Women; and her latest orchestral album, with Orchestra X, Photography, was voted into the Top Ten Classical Albums by USA’s National Public Radio.

Photograph by Sir Cam