Diana Burrell

Like many composers today, Diana Burrell uses a wide range of instrumental colours, but her choice is utterly idiosyncratic. Steel pans and recorders, woodblocks and ocarinas, chorus with cor anglais and deep organ pedals, are combined to conjure an imaginative world unlike anything else in music. From early childhood, there was music in Diana Burrell’s household. Born in Norwich, England in 1948, she learned a lot from her father, an assistant cathedral organist. After graduating in music at Cambridge, Burrell decided on a career as a viola player, but before long her compositions were also attracting attention. Her first big break came when the conductor Richard Hickox invited her to write something for the St Endellion Festival in Cornwall. The result was Missa Sancte Endelliente (1980), the first in a series of impressive choral works, all religious in focus, but far from conventional in expression. The natural world has been a lifelong fascination for Burrell, reflected in her award-winning orchestral work Landscape (1988) and its gloriously entitled successor Das Meer, das so gross und weit ist, da wimmelt’s ohne zahl, grosse und kleine Tiere (The sea, so big and wide, teems with great and small creatures, 1992), and Symphony of Flocks, Herds and Shoals. As her titles suggest, Burrell’s music is refreshingly uninhibited by either traditionalism or doctrinaire modernism. Her music can be abrasive and sweet, childlike and bafflingly wild, but it does indeed “teem” with life.