2018 Presteigne Festival | Martin Butler composer-in-residence
Martin Butler has been announced as composer-in-residence at the 2018 Presteigne Festival.
Born in Romsey, Hampshire in 1960, Martin studied at Manchester University, the Royal Northern College of Music and Princeton University, USA. From 1998-99 he was composer-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He is currently Professor of Music at the University of Sussex.
Martin’s works are widely performed and broadcast both in the UK and abroad. He has received commissions from, among others, the BBC Proms, the London Sinfonietta, the Schubert Ensemble and the Brighton, Cheltenham, Canterbury, Norfolk and Norwich, and Presteigne festivals. His opera A Better Place was premiered by ENO in July 2001 and the same year, Two Rivers was premiered by the Oxford Bach Choir.
More recently he was Composer in Focus with the Brighton Philharmonic and remains pianist with the innovative improvising group, notes inegales and co-director of Club Inégales in London. Regular Presteigne Festival attenders will remember Martin for the wonderful Saxophone Concerto he wrote in 2009 for Australian virtuoso Amy Dickson.
He is currently hard at work on his new commission for piano and chamber orchestra, Concertante Dances, which he will premiere at the Presteigne Festival as piano soloist with the Festival Orchestra under artistic director George Vass at the final concert on Tuesday 28 August.