Born in 1974, Bernard Hughes studied Music and Composition at Oxford University, Goldsmiths College, London, before gaining a PhD in Composition from Royal Holloway, University of London. Bernard Hughes’s music has been commissioned by the BBC Singers, the New London Children’s Choir and the pianist Jakob Fichert. He has received performances at the Huddersfield, Spitalfields and Bangor New Music Festivals, and at venues including Coventry Cathedral and Snape Maltings.
Current projects include a major new work for the BBC Singers, The Death of Balder, which will receive its first concert performance at the City of London Festival on 3 July, having been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in April 2008. In March-April 2009, his children’s opera, written for the London-based W11 Opera, Chincha-Chancha Cooroo, received its international première in Cambridge MA, performed by North Cambridge Family Opera. Bernard Hughes’s new opera Dumbfounded! was premiered at the Tête à Tête Opera Festival in August 2008 at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London. The opera, another collaboration with librettist William Radice, is an adaptation of a short story by the Edwardian writer Saki.
Bernard’s music has been broadcast on Radio 3, and he appeared as a conductor on the recent Channel 4 series Howard Goodall’s Twentieth Century Greats. He writes regularly in the new music periodical Tempo and contributes a regular column for New Notes, the magazine of the Society for the Promotion of New Music.
Bernard Hughes lives in London, and is Composer-in-Residence at the Lady Eleanor Holles School, Hampton.