Oliver Rudland

is a freelance composer known for writing accessible modern music - he enjoys writing in many styles, but specialises in vocal music and opera.

Oliver began his musical life as a trumpeter playing in local orchestras, brass bands and opera groups around Yorkshire. Self-taught as a composer and pianist until the age of nineteen, he then won a Foundation Scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition with Joseph Horovitz and the piano with Niel Immelman; further study followed at Cambridge University with Robin Holloway. Oliver now teaches at Cambridge University and privately, whilst continuing to organise concerts and play in orchestras regularly.

His first commissioned work, the violin sonata Velvet Storm, was premiered at the Cheltenham International Music Festival in 2004. The Nightingale and the Rose, Oliver’s first opera, received its première at the Royal College of Music, London, and was then staged at the Carriageworks Theatre in Leeds for four nights by Leeds Youth Opera in July 2008. Oliver has also had works performed by, among others, Gonville and Caius College Chapel Choir, the Britten Sinfonia, the RCM Contemporary Consort, the Cambridge New Music Ensemble and the Yorkshire Philharmonic Choir. In 2008 he was commissioned to write incidental music for a production of John Webster’s The White Devil at the ADC theatre, Cambridge.

More recently, Oliver's music has been gaining international attention, with the American premiere of his Three Yorkshire Songs and the performance of several of his vocal and instrumental works in France.