Cheryl Frances-Hoad

Cheryl is writing a blog about Amy's Last Dive, her first full length with librettist Adam Strickson, in association with iMove, Yorkshire's Cultural Programme for London 2012. Click here to read it!I

Cheryl's second CD, of vocal and choral works, is due to be recorded by Champs Hill early next year. The new CD will feature two song cycles for mezzo and piano (sung by Jennifer Johnston and accompanied by Joseph Middleton and Alisdair Hogarth), several choral works (including Psalm No. 1, winner of a 2010 British Composer Award) all sung by the choir of Gonville and Caius College Choir (directed by Geoffrey Webber), a six word opera sung by Natalie Raybould, and a song setting words from a 1921 book for new wives sung by Jane Manning and her Minstrels....watch this space for more information!

Cheryl will be writing us a brass quintet called 'The Madness Industry' – a multi-movement piece investigating the theme of psychopathology in everyday society. In 2008, Cheryl became Artist in Residence at the Cambridge University Psychiatry Department, an experience which has given her great insight into aspects of the human mind and has influenced a number of her recent compositions. The first performance will be at Richmond Concert Society on the 25th September 2012. See the PRS website for more information, and watch this space for news and further developments.

Cheryl's new song cycle for Jennifer Johnston (mezzo) and Joseph Middleton (piano) will be performed in Leeds on the 11th October, alongside Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben, the work that inspired One Life Stand. The award-winning crime writer and poet Sophie Hannah will also be at the performance and will be taking part in a post-concert discussion about the work. Read a blog post about the song cycle on the Howard Assembly Room blog, and book tickets here.

Tickets are now available for two performances of Five Rackets for Trio Relay, commissioned by Chamber Music 2000 and the Lawson Trio, for double piano trio. The Olympic-inspired work is written for professional piano trio and amateur piano trio, and will be performed by the Lawsons alongside pupils from Chethams School of Music at the Bridgewater Hall (on 7th Feburary 2012 at 1.10pm) and by students from the Junior Royal Academy of Music at the Purcell Room (on 10th April 2012 at 8pm). A new CD featuring the work will be launched at the Purcell Room concert featuring students from Pro Corda. To book tickets for the Manchester concert click here, and for the London concert click here.

Listen to Oliver Condy and Rebecca Franks discuss Cheryl's CD along with other new releases here. (Cheryl's Cd is discussed from c. 00:14 to 00:20).

Cheryl is absolutely delighted that her debut CD has been chosen as "Chamber Music Choice" in the October edition of BBC Music Magazine.The CD has been awarded 5 stars both for its performance and recording quality which is the highest star rating possible! Barry Witherden writes that Cheryl's music is "full of feeling and memorable gestures", adding that "her compositions command attention through their well-constructed musical development and the emotional intensity of their sound-worlds".

Posing the question "whether music inspired by literary works can stand on its own, divorced from its notional programme", he answers confidently "Certainly Cheryl Frances-Hoad's can". He praises the performers who "all play with an admirable combination of passion, precision and attention to tone production", and ends with the comment: "Respect to Champs Hill and the various funders. Left to the majors, I'm sure this music would have gone unrecorded, and that would have been a great shame".

Hear a clip of The Snowwoman on the BBC Music Magazine homepage (scroll to bottom right). Thanks again to everybody involved in the making of the CD!

Cheryl's six word opera, commissioned by James Young and the Warehouse Ensemble, and premiered alongside many other new short operas at the Tete a Tete Opera Festival this year, has received a great review in So so gay Magazine. James Waygood writes "...But there were some really great little works in among the chaff. Cheryl Frances-Hoad's unhinged I Promised You Everything Last Night was a brilliant exploration of inflection and semantics through the medium of an intensely desperate lover." Read the full review here.

Ivan Hewitt says the following about Cheryl's CD in The Telegraph this week (25th August 2011): "The care lavished on this CD of chamber works by the 31-year-old Cheryl Frances-Hoad is patent. An impressive array of musicians including oboist Nicholas Daniel play their hearts out for her. Frances-Hoad's skill at creating a rich texture from modest chamber forces is astonishing"

Musicweb International have picked Cheryl's debut CD as their "CD of the Month" and have given it an excellent revue. Carla Rees, the reviewer, cites the album as "excellent throughout, both in the musical material and in the quality of the performance", adding that the CD is "an essential part of any contemporary music listening library". Read the full review here.

The Glory Tree has received an excellent review in The Times. Paul Driver writes "Frances-Hoad is a remarkable talent. This retrospective of her work is like a declaration of faith in the eternal verities of composition......traditional skilfulness does not preclude originality, and indeed, audacity". He goes on to praise many of the works on the disc, commenting on the "enormous panache" of the structure of Memoria and the "daring linguistic excursion" and "fierce stretching" of the soprano voice in the title work of the CD.

The Glory Tree (Cheryl's debut CD) is now available to purchase from many online retailors! You can purchase the CD from the Champs Hill website, Amazon, and many other stores including HMV.

Cheryl's debut CD has received a 4 star review in the Guardian. Andrew Clements writes "There's something engagingly freewheeling about Frances-Hoad's works, the feeling that she is quite unselfconscious about the music she writes and oblivious to how others might categorise it." Read the full review here, and also see a review from the Musical Pointers website here.

Cheryl's debut CD, The Glory Tree (Champs HIll Records) Is now available on the Presto Classical website. The official launch is on the 31st May but you can pre-order you copy now! See their website for more details.

Cheryl's 2002 work for oboe/cor anglais and piano quartet has been selected for this prestigious scheme. Artists, publishers and programmers nominated nearly 70 chamber pieces, from which a distinguished jury has chosen 12 works to be played over a two year period from June 2011. Jury members included BBC Radio 3's Andrew Kurowski (chair), Guardian music critic Tom Service, clarinettist Joy Farrall, Alasdair Nicholson, Director of St. Magnus Festival and pianist/broadcaster Stephen Plaistow. All Encore live performances will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3, and accompanied by events designed to encourage wider audiences and greater understanding of the music. Read the full press release here.

Fiona Maddocks has named Cheryl as a name to watch in her article "Women Composers: notes from the musical margins", printed in the Guardian on Sunday 13th March. Click here to read the article.

Cheryl is delighted to have been awarded funding from the RVW Trust towards three of her current commissions: One Life Stand (a new song cycle for Jennifer Johnston and Joseph Middleton, setting poems by Sophie Hannah, which has been commissioned by the Cambridge Summer Music Festival) Five Rackets for Trio Relay (a new piece for the Lawson Trio and Chamber Music 2000) to be premiered at the Bridgewater Hall in February 2012) and a new piano trio for the Phoenix PIano Trio (for their Beyond Beethoven Project, to be premiered at the Forge Arts Centre in London in June).

A three page article all about Cheryl and her compositions will feature in the next issue of Choir and Organ Magazine. It goes on sale on the 16th April. See the Magazine's website for more information.

IPPR North have chosen Cheryl as one of the 50 "ones to watch" in the North of England. Northern Lights 2011 is part of a wider look at where ideas, innovation and inspiration will come from over the next few years as the North of England seizes the challenges and opportunities ahead. The list features politicians, entrepreneurs, business leaders and creatives: Cheryl is the only musician included on the list.

Cheryl is currently writing a new work for double piano trio for Chamber Music 2000 and the Lawson Trio. The new piece, entitled Five Rackets for Trio Relay will be of 12 minutes duration and in five short, continuous movements, each of which will be based on an Olympic sport. It will be scored for double piano trio (2 pianos, 4 strings), with one piano trio being made up of student performers, and the other by the Lawson Trio. Under the umbrella of Chamber Music 2000, students will have the opportunity to collaborate and perform chamber music alongside a professional group, providing a valuable, new experience for the young performers. The work will be premiered at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, in February 2012, with further performances at the Purcell Room and the Menuhin Hall

Cheryl's new work for 'cello and piano will be premiered at the 2011 Three Choirs Festival in Worcester on the 7th August, by Jamie Walton ('cello) and Daniel Grimwood (piano). The concert, which also features work by Saint-Saëns and Chopin, will take place in Huntingdon Hall at 2.30pm (tbc). Visit the Three Choirs Festival's website for more information and to book tickets.

Cheryl is currently writing a new piano trio for the Phoenix Piano Trio, inspired by Beethoven's Archduke Trio. This work is part of the Trios major new project entitled Beyond Beethoven, a series of five concerts covering all of Beethoven's compositions for piano trio and combining them with five especially commissioned new works. Beethoven's works will be performed alongside five new compositions for piano trio in an exciting combination aiming to reveal the impact of the classic works on today's composers. The other composers who have been commissioned to write new works include Edwin Roxburgh, Philip Venables and James Young. The premiere of Cheryl's work will take place in London on Wednesday 29th June at the Forge Arts Venue in London with a further performance at the Hollywell Music Room Oxford on Saturday 2nd of July. Check the Phoenix Piano Trio's website for more information on the concerts and how to book tickets.

Cheryl's new song cycle, commissioned by the Cambridge Summer Music Festival, will be premiered by Jennifer Johnston (mezzo soprano) and Joseph Middleton (piano) on the 20th July 2011 (venue tbc) as part of the 2011. The new work sets words by the best selling author and award winning poet Sophie Hannah, and is a reaction to Schumann's famous Frauenliebe und Leben, which will also be performed at the concert.

Cheryl's Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize-winning string quartet, My day in Hell will be performed by the Wu String Quartet at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, during the Sunday Morning Coffee Concert on 20th February at 12pm. Also in the programme are works by Stephan Montague, Piazolla and Ligeti. Visit the Kettle's Yard website for more information and to book tickets.

Cheryl became the youngest of only three composers to win two prizes in one year when her setting of Psalm 1 won the 'Liturgical Category' and Stolen Rhythm from Hommage to Haydn, for solo piano won the "Instrumental Solo or Duo" category. You can find out more about the awards on the BCA website, and read articles about the awards on the websites of Gramophone Magazine, Muso Magazine, BBC Music Magazine, the M Magazine (published by the PRS).

Cheryl Frances-Hoad has recently signed to Cadenza Music and her works will soon become available via Cadenza's website. If you would like to receive updates on the availability of Cheryls music please email info@cadenza-music.com

Read a review of the performance here.

The award, the first of its kind, allows the Fellow to explore, create, share and present their work through lively interaction with two of the country's foremost cultural and academic institutions, with access to a wealth of intellectual and artistic resources and the opportunity to have work performed publicly. Visit the DARE website for more information.

Interior Traces is a radio drama accompanied by new video works and a musical score by Cheryl, presented as a series of live multi-media events that looks at how our images and imaginings of the brain have radically changed medicine, law, and our sense of self. Spanning one hundred and thirty years, it examines the possible lives of two characters had they lived in Britain in 1906, 2009, and 2030, and raises questions about how our society should regulate brain imaging in the future. Following its success at the Wellcome Collection and Cheltenham Science Festival, Interior Traces is touring in May as part of the Identity Project, a 9-month season of UK-wide activity from the Wellcome Trust. For more information on the tour visit the Interior Traces website. You can also listen to a Guardian podcast about the project here, hear James Wilkes and Louise Whitely interviews about Interior Traces on BBC Radio 4'sMaterial World here, and see the play featured as the Guardian's Pick of the Week here.

Theatricality has always been Jane Manning's forte, and the best of the songs played up to her histrionic gift. At one end of the spectrum was David Sawer's Caravan, a setting of a nonsense poem by Dada poet Hugo Ball, at the other was Cheryl Frances-Hoad's entertaining 'Don't!', full of pert advice to housewives taken from an etiquette guide of 1913. They were great fun, and performed with lip-smacking relish by Manning and her minstrels.

On Wednesday night the Purcell Room hosted a concert to mark 10 years of Chamber Music 2000, the scheme started by the Schubert Ensemble to commission and propagate new chamber music for student ensembles. The aim has been to create a body of new music by leading composers which is technically accessible to learner players. The concert featured music by twelve composers played by performers ranging from professional groups (the Schubert Ensemble themselves and the Lawson Trio) to students from the Birmingham Conservatoire and the Royal Academy Junior Department, right down to a group of eight-year-olds from a state school in north London. Although there was not a weak piece on display, I did feel at time that everything was a bit too polite: a leaning towards slow and quiet music at the expense of the loud and rhythmical – although Cheryl Frances Hoad's Pay Close Attention bucked the trend enjoyably.

"Day Four of this year's PLG Young Artists New Year Series again brought a contrasted assortment of recitals. The early-evening slot featured the excellent Finzi Quartet in two very different pieces. My Day in Hell (2007) found Cheryl Frances Hoad grappling with the implications of Dante's "Divine Comedy" in a diverse yet tautly argued movement structured around the proportions of Hell as its most famous commentator envisioned it. For all that, an element of 'comedy' – at least in the human sense – ensured that the musical response never became overbearing. A striking piece from someone with something to say..."