Richard Blackford studied at the Royal College of Music London, where he was awarded the Tagore Gold Medal, then in Italy with Hans Werner Henze. He was subsequently first Composer-in-Residence at Balliol College Oxford. His music, which includes three operas, two ballets and many works for orchestra, chorus and chamber ensembles, has been performed and broadcast all over the world and has been featured in the Adelaide, Cork, Montepulciano, Brighton, Cheltenham, Long Island and Berlin Festivals, and has been recorded on Sony Classical, Warner Classics, Decca, and Nimbus labels.

In 2000 his four-hour choral and orchestral score for CNN/BBC Millennium won an Emmy Award for Best Title Sequence and for which Richard was nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Music. His musical King, with lyrics by Maya Angelou, was first performed at the Piccadilly Theatre, London starring Simion Estes, released on Decca and then chosen to be performed at President Clinton’s Inauguration in 1997.

In 2008 Richard was appointed the first ever Composer in Association with the Brno Philharmonic, who gave the world premiere of his Violin Concerto. His three critically acclaimed choral works Mirror Of Perfection, Voices of Exile and Not In Our Time were all subjects of television documentaries and have been frequently broadcast and performed around the world. Over a period of twelve years he collaborated with Tony Harrison on three Channel 4 film poems and music for productions at the Delphi Festival and The Royal National Theatre.

Richard has composed extensively for film, having over two hundred credits for the BBC, Channel 4, ZDF, ARD as well as four feature films that include the award winning Song For A Raggy Boy. In 2014 The Great Animal Orchestra was premiered to great acclaim at the Cheltenham Festival and broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 before being successfully released on Nimbus Records and performed in the USA and Germany. 2015 saw the premiere of his BBC Singers commission Within The Seed and the premiere of his oboe concerto The Better Angels of Our Nature by Emily Pailthorpe and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The latter was successfully released on Champs Hill Records and will be released on Nimbus Records in 2017. In July 2015 Richard was awarded Die Goldene Deutschland for services to music in Germany.

Listen to a selection of Richard's music below.