Eleanor Alberga: Women Make Music
This will be Eleanor Alberga’s first song cycle. Having trained as a singer and pianist at the Royal Academy of Music from 1970, she avoided writing much at first for the voice or piano so that she could develop as a composer without the influence from performing. Further to achieving great success with her opera, Letters of a Love Betrayed (premiered by Music Theatre Wales at the Royal Opera House Linbury Studio Theatre in 2009), this commission will be the stepping stone to developing a knowledge and experience of composing songs. In the future the composer hopes to complete 3 symphonies, 4 song cycles, several choral works, 3 string quartets and many piano works. She believes that this is absolutely the perfect time to fund the commissioned work for baritone and orchestra because her work is at a crucial stage of development and she needs to move forward at this important stage of her creative process. She will benefit greatly from this project as she will be working with a fine singer and conductor on her first song cycle, a genre which she has wanted to explore, and is now happening just at the right time. This project, following on from her BBC commission for the 2015 Last Night of the Proms, may also help her to obtain an exclusive publishing contract, as well as PR to enable her work to be disseminated widely. This may also lead to an ideal future in which she can become a full-time composer.