Biography
Cheryl Frances-Hoad graduated from Gonville and Caius College Cambridge with a triple 1st in 2001 and an Mphil (with Distinction) in Composition, also at Cambridge. She has just been awarded her PhD in Composition from Kings College London, where she studied with Dr. Silvina Milstein.
She began composing at the age of eight while studying 'cello and piano at the Yehudi Menuhin School, and since then has won many prizes, including the Purcell Composition Prize, The Bach Choir Carol Competition, the BBC Young Composers Workshop 1996, the Cambridge Composer's Competition, the Birmingham Conservatoire Composition Competition, the Robert Helps Prize, the International String Orchestra Composition Competition and the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize. She has recently won the Music Commission from Wicklow County Council's "Per Cent for Arts Scheme" and will write a piano concerto for Bobby Chen and the Greystones Orchestra, to be premiered in Wicklow in 2009.
She has had two ballets choreographed by Lynn Seymour and Geoffrey Cauley; the second was performed by Scottish Ballet in the Britten Theatre, London. Her commissions include works for the BBC, the Surrey Philharmonic, the Manchester International 'Cello Festival, the Chard Festival of Women in Music, the Bass Club, Bass Fest, the Fujita Piano Trio and the Almeida Festival, and her music has been featured on BBC2, ITV, Radio 3 and Classic FM. In 2000 the Cambridge Music Festival commissioned a work to commemorate the 250th anniversary of J.S. Bach's death, which was performed by the Cambridge University Chamber Orchestra and conducted by Nicholas Daniel. In November 2001 Cheryl had her first Chamber Opera, broken lines: sonata for opera premiered by the New Cambridge Opera Group, as part of the Britten@25 Festival, with generous funding from the R.V.W. Trust. June 2002 saw two premieres: the Spitalfields Festival 2002 commission (a work for Nicholas Daniel and the Schubert Ensemble, with funding from the Foyle Foundation), and Melancholia, a piano trio for the London Mozart Trio at the Wigmore Hall. October 2002 saw another premiere at the Wigmore Hall, with a solo 'cello work for Thomas Carroll and Y.C.A.T, and a commission from the Zurich Chamber Orchestra.
Cheryl was one of six featured composers in Tete a Tete's opera project Family Matters (based on Beaumarchais' third Figaro play The Guilty Mother ) with a libretto by Olivier-Award winner Amanda Holden: workshops took place in Battersea Arts Centre in September 2003, with the final opera being staged throughout February 2004 at the Bridewell Theatre, followed with twelve performances around the country. (The RVW Trust has also assisted this venture). In June The Glory Tree, a song cycle for the Kreisler Ensemble (inspired by Shamanic rituals and sung entirely in Old English) received it’s first performance in the South Bank's Fresh Series at the Purcell Room.
Future projects include a piano suite for pianist Bobby Chen, and a violin piece for Natalia Lomeiko (winner of the Pagannini International Violin Competition).
Cheryl is the holder of the Mendelssohn Scholarship 2002, the Bliss Prize 2002, joint winner of the Harriet Cohen Award 2002, and has also received awards from the Newby Trust, the Earls Colne Educational trust and the Sidney Perry Foundation.
In February 2006 Cheryl spent a week as Composer in Residence at the University of South Florida, after winning the Robert Helps Prize, and her piano trio was performed in Florida and New York. She has also worked on various ethnomusicology projects as a research assistant and has several arrangements of Dvorak Slavonic Dances for String Octet published by Merton Music.