Deirdre Gribbin

Opera Composition - Winner 1998

Composer Dr Deirdre Gribbin was born in Belfast. She is a Fulbright Fellow and studied at Princeton University USA. She was a Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge and is currently a Leverhulme Trust Resident artist at The MRC Laboratory in Cambridge.

Gribbin has been featured at Lincoin Center New York, CCNY New York with her orchestral work Unity of Being, and The Taipei and Presence Paris Festivals. In 2006 Goliath, her concerto for percussion and orchestra opened The Belfast Festival. Gribbin was featured in The Philharmonia Orchestra’s Music of Today Series at The Royal Festival Hall in 2001. Her violin concerto Venus Blazing toured the UK with soloist Ernst Kovacic in 2004 with lighting by Bruce Springstein’s lighting designer Jeff Ravitz and was directed by Lou Stein. Her second opera ‘Crossing the Sea’ premiered at Wilton’s Music Hall in 2008. Richard Morrison in The Times wrote “…if she writes another opera as haunting as this she and we will be lucky.”

Gribbin has received performances on BBC Radio 3, Radio France, and Almeida and Aldeburgh Festivals. She has written music for Richard Harris’ last film My Kingdom, which was nominated for a Screen International award. She works extensively in radio and has collaborated with director and writer Lou Stein on Embers starring Patrick Stewart and Dostoevsky’s The Possessed for BBC Radio 3. Gribbin was Artistic Director of the Society for the Promotion of New Music spnm from 2003-5 programming at The Tate Liverpool and National Film Theatre. She serves on the ISCM British panel.

She was commissioned to set Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney’s ‘Anahorish’ as a gift on his receiving a lifetime achievement award at Queen’s University Belfast. She is currently writing a piano concerto for Finghin Collins for performance with The RTE National Symphony orchestra of Ireland in 2012, a new work for Huddersfield Festival and is developing a new opera. Her orchestral music has been recorded in the lyric fm label and her chamber music will be recorded by Ailish Tynan and The Vanbrught quartet for NMC in 2012.