Born in Wales in 1969 and brought up in Warwickshire, Julian Philips studied music at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is one of Britain’s most versatile and busy young composers.
Philips’ music has been performed widely across the world at major festivals and venues including the Proms, the Tanglewood MusicFestival, Welsh National Opera, Glyndebourne and the Wigmore Hall, by international artists including Gerald Finley, Dawn Upshaw, Sir Thomas Allen, the Vertavo String Quartet, the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra and the BBC orchestras. He has received numerous broadcasts, and his work has been the subject of a BBC Wales television documentary.
Philips has enjoyed a particular affinity with music for the voice and has received critical acclaim for his settings of e e cummings, Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson and Arthur Rimbaud among others. His song cycle I lay me down to dream of spring (1992) was an early success when performed by baritone Martyn Hill and broadcast by Radio 3. Fern Hill was featured in Dawn Upshaw’s 1997 Wigmore Hall masterclass and subsequently commercially released on the Sain label while There is a morn by men unseen, premiered by Gerald Finley and Julius Drake, was commissioned for the Director’s Festival Gala Concert at the Wigmore Hall in May 2003. In April 2005 Philips’ String Quartet with baritone, Sweet Love Remembered, was premièred by the Vertavo String Quartet. His Masque for Caliban, commissioned by Orchestra of the Swan was premiered at Three Choirs Festival in 2006 with baritone David Stout. The Royal Philharmonic Society commissioned a new work in 2007 – Four Characters for viola player Lawrence Power.
Following the success of Philips’ 1999 orchestral work Strange Seas, commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia and later performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the BBC Proms commissioned a symphonic poem Out of Light which was premièred to great acclaim at the Royal Albert Hall by the BBCNOW in 2001. In 2005 a revised version of the piece was featured at the Tanglewood Music Festival. Philips has recently worked on a full-length ballet based on Les Liaisons Dangereuses, with choreography by Michael Corder for English National Ballet. This was followed in 2007 by a new ballet, The Snow Queen, also for Corder and ENB, based on the music of Prokofiev. The Snow Queen was toured again in early 2010.
In 2007 Philips took up a position as the first ever Composer in Residence at Glyndebourne Opera, during which time he wrote several chamber operas – Of Water and Tears, and Followers, both completed during 2007. Of Water and Tears took place in The Jerwood Studio with soloists from the Glyndebourne Chorus as part of the Jerwood Chorus Development Scheme. Followers, written by librettist Simon Christmas, was a site-specific promenade opera using three spaces at Glyndebourne: The Organ Room, The Old Green Room and the Ebert Room. A new one act chamber opera, The Yellow Sofa, written for the Jerwood Chorus Development Scheme, was premiered in August 2009, for which Philips collaborated with librettist Edward Kemp to create an adaptation of a novella by one of Portugal’s best loved writers, Eca de Quieros. On the strength of his tenure as Composer in Residence, Philips was also commissioned to write a new full-length opera with a libretto by Nicky Singer for production in 2010. Knight Crew, a re-creation of the Arthur legend in a contemporary gangland setting, gave an unprecedented opportunity for young performers and community groups to take part in a Glyndebourne production, and received critical acclaim following its premiere run in March 2010. BBC Television filmed the development of Knight Crew over the year leading up to the premiere, and a new series – ‘Gareth goes to Glyndebourne’ will be aired in June 2010, a documentary on Knight Crew from the perspective of its chorus-master Gareth Malone.
Ballet and opera are natural progressions for Philips who already has an impressive track-record in composing for the theatre. He has enjoyed a particularly fruitful artistic partnership with director Michael Grandage, with whom he has collaborated on productions including The Tempest starring Sir Derek Jacobi (Old Vic, London), Richard III with Kenneth Branagh (Crucible Theatre, Sheffield) and Edward II starring Joseph Fiennes. Their production of As You Like It (Lyric Hammersmith/Crucible Theatre) went on to win the South Bank Theatre Award (2001). In 2006 Philips’ music for Chris Luscombe’s production of The Comedy of Errors at Shakespeare’s Globe received widespread acclaim.
A vital force in education, Philips took up the post of Joint Head of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in September 2004. He has tutored at Cambridge University, and led innovative adult learning programmes at the Wigmore Hall and for the Orchestra of the Swan. In 2007 Philips was made Honorary Fellow of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Commissions and Performances
Dance Fragment 1 – 2002
2002: Civic Hall, Stratford – upon-Avon
2002: Mikkeli, Finland
17 October 2003: Civic Hall, Bedworth
Divertissement – 2003
2003: Civic Hall, Stratford-upon-Avon
2003: Oakengates Theatre, Telford
Swift Partitions -1998/2005
9 May 2005: Civic Hall, Stratford – upon-Avon
10 May 2005: Pittville Pump Rooms, Cheltenham
Masque for Caliban – 2006
7 August 2006: Three Choirs Festival
Divertissement
General Dance
Overture
Air Tendre
Air Gai
Tambourins 1 & 2
Lovers’ meeting
Dance of Triumph
Danceny
A dancing lesson
Dance of Triumph (reprise)
Work on my new full length score for acclaimed choreographer Michael Corder’s ballet on Les Liaisons Dangereuses, commissioned by the English National Ballet, has taken up the best part of the past year; Divertissement is the first extracted concert suite, made specially for David Curtis and the Orchestra of the Swan.
Choderlos de Laclos’ famous novel needs little introduction, in part due to Christopher Hampson’s successful theatrical version and a host of popular cinematic transformations. Michael Corder’s ballet is a brilliant transformation of this complex novel of letters, that explores the extraordinary stratagems of the Marquise de Merteuil, her rakish soul mate the Vicomte de Valmont, and their many unfortunate victims: the young and innocent Cécile de Volanges, the handsome Chevalier Danceny and the noble Madame de Tourvel.
Divertissement deals mainly with the music from Scenes 2 and 3 of the ballet and incorporates five Rameau dances, absorbed into the score to evoke the sophisticated world in which Laclos’ novel is set. The Divertissement itself (numbers 2-5) is a ballet-within-a-ballet in which we first meet Danceny, premier danseur at the Paris Opera, framed by a courtly introduction and sparkling lovers’ meeting. The Dance of Triumph presents the Marquise de Merteuil glorying in her seductive power over the opposite sex. Absorbed in the centre of this dance are two numbers from Scene 3 – a solo for Danceny and a dancing lesson in which he teaches the young Cécile her first tentative dance steps.
While this Divertissement has been created closely on Corder’s scenario, the music can be enjoyed as a succession of shifting moods, colours and gestures. As it incorporates the bulk of the score’s Rameau based dances, it also stands as a homage to this giant of the French baroque – each transformation of rhythm, harmony and orchestration a tribute to Rameau’s exquisite musical style.
Julian Philips
Swift Partitions for baritone and ensemble
An Everywhere of Silver
I started Early – took my Dog
Though the great Waters sleep
The waters chased him as he fled
Water makes many Beds
Three times – we parted – Breath – and I -
Fortitude incarnate
My River runs to thee -
Swift Partitions is a song cycle built from a sequence of eight short poems by Emily Dickinson, each dealing with the subject of the sea. The work is not narrative, but instead alternates philosophical meditations on the sea (Songs 1, 3, 5 & 
with more immediate “encounters”: a surreal walk with the sea, (Song 2), two near drownings (Songs 4 & 5) and a river’s almost erotic desire to join the ocean (Song 8). These encounters are predominantly fast and restless in character and set in relief by the slower meditations, which deploy a more fragmented and rhetorical musical style. The work’s title is taken from Song 7 – a fitting image for a cycle whose songs are essentially short and elusive in character.
The work was commissioned in 1998 by baritone Jeremy Huw Williams and originally conceived for voice and piano. This instrumental version was begun in 2000 and completed this year for baritone David Stout and the Orchestra of the Swan.
Julian Philips
Masque for Caliban
Scored for baritone and small ensemble, my Masque for Caliban is a centenary tribute to Sir Michael Tippett, via Shakespeare’s The Tempest. If Tippett gave Ariel music voice in his famous Songs for Ariel, my Masque focuses on Caliban through the eyes of the Barbadian poet, Kamau Brathwaite, whose poem Caliban provides the poetic framework. Brathwaite redefines Shakespeare’s creation as a powerful symbol not only of enslavement and oppression but also the rape of the natural world.
And i caliban
Blind and i caliban
tortured and i caliban
twisted and bent
Brathwaite’s text is set in a declamatory and theatrical style and the work has been conceived not only for the extraordinary soloists inside the Orchestra of the Swan but also the young charismatic baritone, David Stout.
Julian Philips