Gavin Higgins

Characterised by an unfettered imagination, Gavin Higgins’ output includes a Concerto Grosso for Brass Band and Orchestra (2022); a percussion concerto, Beano (2023), celebrating characters from the children’s comic; and an opera based on Norse mythology, The Monstrous Child, premiered in 2019. His fascination with brass instruments is unsurprising. Born in Gloucester in 1983, Higgins cut his musical teeth in the local brass band world and subsequently studied French horn. Among other works to showcase brass are his 2019 trombone concerto The Book of Miracles and Dark Arteries, a 2016 collaboration with Ballet Rambert. But Higgins is a composer who sidesteps easy classification. By turn visceral and reflective, virtuosic yet disciplined, and refreshingly unconstrained by fashion, his music exerts a broad appeal. This may be heard in the immediacy of Velocity, commissioned for 2014’s Last Night of the BBC Proms, or across a body of chamber works testifying to a sophisticated instrumental palette—and, in the case of 2018’s Dance Suite, a readiness to inject a measure of fun and affectionate parody.