Composers in Focus
Composers in focus – Nneka Cummins and Michael Berkeley
This year we focus on two composers across four concerts in the festival. Both composers have distinct and unique voices and reflect different creative phases of their lives, Nneka Cummins a highly successful young composer and Michael Berkeley, a composer with decades of experience from chamber music to opera. Catch these composers’ works in lunchtime and evening concerts, come and say hello to them in person or hear them speak in pre-concert Q&As.
Michael Berkeley
Michael Berkeley was born in 1948, the eldest son of the composer Sir Lennox Berkeley and a godson of Benjamin Britten. As a chorister at Westminster Cathedral, singing naturally played an important part in his early education.
He studied composition, singing, and piano at the Royal Academy of Music but it was not until his late twenties, when he went to study with Richard Rodney Bennett, that Berkeley began to concentrate exclusively on composing. In 1977 he was awarded the Guinness Prize for Composition; two years later he was appointed Associate Composer to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Since then Berkeley’s music has been played all over the globe and by some of the world’s finest musicians.
His work has been commissioned and performed by artists including André Previn, Sir Colin Davis, Mstislav Rostropovich, Heather Harper, John Harle, Nicholas Daniel, Huddersfield Festival, Cheltenham Festival, London Symphony Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales (where he was Composer in Association for three years), Carducci Quartet and Nash Ensemble. His music is regularly heard at the BBC Proms, where his commissions have included large-scale works The Garden of Earthly Delights, Songs of Awakening Love and Concerto for Orchestra.
Photo Credit: BBC
He has composed three operas; Baa Baa Black Sheep, premiered in 1993 and based on the childhood of Rudyard Kipling; Jane Eyre, his second collaboration with David Malouf, which has been produced in the UK, Australia and America; and most recently For You written to a libretto by Ian McEwan and commissioned by Music Theatre Wales which was also recorded by Signum Classics.
Berkeley’s significant orchestral work, and much of his chamber music and his operas, is available on CD as part of the Chandos Berkeley Edition.
He was Artistic Director of the Cheltenham International Music Festival, where he premiered over a hundred new works and initiated a policy of having a contemporary work in every programme, built the music programme for the Sydney Festival in Australia for three years and, with Judith Weir and Anthony Payne, jointly directed the Spitalfields Festival. He has, for several years, been the featured composer for the New York Philharmusica. He currently presents BBC Radio 3’s Private Passions, which won the Broadcasting Press Guild’s Radio Programme of the Year Award in 1996, and for nine years was Chairman of the Governors of The Royal Ballet until 2012.
Michael Berkeley was made a CBE for services to music in the Queen’s Birthday Honours published on June 16th 2012 and was appointed a non-party political member of the House of Lords in 2013.
Nneka Cummins
Nneka Cummins is an award-winning composer and music producer from Liverpool, based in London. They have an electro-acoustic and acoustic practice, with a current focus on colour, percussiveness and organic flowing melodies to form original sound worlds from new sonic combinations and timbral blends. Nneka is currently one of the composers on the 2026 RPS Programme and is writing a wind quintet piece for Manchester Camerata. In 2025, Nneka was awarded the Ivor Classical Award for Best Large Ensemble for their work ‘finding gills [when they try to drown you]’. finding gills was written during their time as a nonclassical Artist in Residence 2023-2025.
Nneka has composed for a number of prominent ensembles including Chineke! orchestra, the Marion Consort, Sinfonia Smith Square, Ensemble 10/10, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s new music group and Psappha. In 2023, Nneka was awarded a Paul Hamlyn Artist’s award. Nneka was a Sound and Music New Voices Composer 2022/2023 (supported by Arts Council England, PRS Foundation and The Vaughan Williams Foundation). Nneka was a Philharmonia Composer Academy fellow 2022/2023 and their work, 3 Planets premiered at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in May 2023. The concert recording was released on NMC Recordings in October 2023 and included on NMC’s compilation album, NMC at 35 in September 2024.
Photo Credit: Rebekah Merriman
Nneka was the winner of Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s Rushworth Composition Prize 2021. Nneka completed their masters in composition at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in 2022 and was awarded The Gareth Neame Scholarship and The Trinity College London Scholarship.