David Horne

David Horne is widely regarded as one of the most talented Scottish musicians of his generation. When still a teenage he established his name both as a pianist, making his BBC Proms concerto debut in 1990, and as composer, with a prize-winning work at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. His composition studies took him to the USA, first at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and then at Harvard University.

Horne’s music can be views both as a response, and as a reaction, to modernism. His language has evolved naturally from the classically-orientated modernist masters, exploring essentially abstract musical ideas. Yet Horne deploys these with an attractive lyricism, a lively ear for instrumentation, and with invigorating energy. Such communicative qualities have drawn leading virtuoso performers on both sides of the Atlantic to commission works, including violist Nobuko Imai (Stilled Voices), percussionist Evelyn Glennie (Reaching Out) and pianist Boris Berezovsky (Liszt).

David Horne’s ensemble scores such as Out of the Air and the Concerto for six Players have been performed internationally by the London Sinfonietta, the Birmingham contemporary Music Group, the California EAR Unit, the Ensemble für neue Musik Zürich, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. His large-scale output includes a Piano Concerto whose premiere in 1993 featured the composer as soloist two chamber operas Jason Field and Travellers, and the music theatre work Beyond the Blue Horizon, written for Trestle Theatre and the Britten Sinfonia and toured extensively in the UK in 1997. His chamber works include two string quartets, composed for the Mendelssohn Festival and Yggdrasil Quartets. Horne has built a strong relationship with the Northlands Festival in Scotland with a series of commissioned scores.

New works by David Horne include Flex for piano and ensemble, performed in Boston and London with the composer as soloist, and the recently premiered glow for nine instrumentalists. Current compositional projects include a Koussivitzky commission for the aspen Wind Quintet, a new work to be premiered in NewYork by cellist Fred Sherry and the compose as pianists, and a new stagework for Scottish Opera based on the life of Thomas Muir for premiere in Edinburgh in Autumn 1999.