James Dillon
James Dillon is one of the UK’s most internationally celebrated and performed composers. The recipient of a number of prizes and awards including the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis and the Japan Foundation Artist Scholarship, he has also won an unprecedented five Royal Philharmonic Society awards, most recently winning Chamber-scale Composition category in 2018 for Tanz/haus : triptych 2017. He has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Huddersfield and is Emeritus Professor in Composition, University of Minnesota. Dillon’s music has been published exclusively by Peters Edition since 1982.
Dillon’s catalogue of works includes, Nine Rivers, an epic three-and-a-half hour sequence of works composed over more than two decades. First performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, BBC Singers and Les Percussions de Strasbourg in 2010, it has subsequently been heard in New York and at the Holland Festival to great acclaim. Nine Rivers was conceived as a collection of works with 'internal symmetries' and is indicative of Dillon’s tendency to think in terms of large-scale cycles. In the mid-1980s, Dillon began a 'German Triptych', a set of orchestral works based on the idea of 'illumination as an emanation of darkness', which the musicologist Richard Toop described as "a music full of figures which, like the stars, are intense, yet seem almost infinitely far away.” Other series of works include L'evolution du vol, The Book of Elements (volumes 1-5), Erotic Triptych, and Emblemata : Carnival, among others.
The recording of his chamber opera, Philomela, won the Grand Prix de l’Académie du Disque Lyrique 2010. The work, based on the Ovidian myth of Philomela, Procne, and Tereus, premiered in Porto in 2004, with further performances in Strasbourg, Paris and Budapest.
Polyptych: Mnemosyne... (Acts of Memory and Mourning), for large ensemble, was commissioned by Ensemble Intercontemporarin to open Pierre Bleuse's first season as music director in 2023 and performed at the Philharmonie de Paris. Divided into parts which reflect and intersect each other, the work is in inspired by Renaissance ideas of imagination as a form of memory and altar pieces known as polyptychs (or theatres of memory) with their multiple folds and reflections.
A new commission for Klangforum Wien will be presented in October 2025 to celebrate the group's 40th anniversary season.
