'Parhelion' - an extract from Looking West (2022), performed by soprano Rebecca Bottone, and mezzo Rebecca Afonwy-Jones with the Nova Music Opera Ensemble, conducted by George Vass.

Looking West was specially commissioned to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose music has long been a source of inspiration for composer Julian Philips and writer Rebecca Hurst. It interweaves three voices. 

The overarching story is of the Celtic Saint Bega (mezzo), who escaped her father’s house with the help of a magic bracelet, travelled across the Irish Sea, and found sanctuary in Cumbria – an act of personal pilgrimage, a young woman forging life on her own terms. 

A second strand shifts to a 20th century, through the work of the Cumbrian artist Winifred Nicholson (soprano), who painted unforgettable pictures on St Bees Head. 

The final voice is that of a contemporary Pilgrim (actor), making his way cross country, guiding the audience on a shared journey, and struggling with familiar issues of everyday life in contemporary Britain. 

A work that takes key themes from the life and work of Ralph Vaughan Williams – especially the spiritual enrichment we can find in the natural world and the transformative power of music and art – and asks what they mean today.

Parhelion from Looking West (2022)for soprano, mezzo soprano, actor & ensemble

Born in Wales in 1969 and brought up in Warwickshire, Julian Philips studied music at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is one of Britain’s most versatile composers. His music has been performed across the world at major festivals and venues including the BBC Proms, Tanglewood Music Festival, Welsh National Opera, Glyndebourne and Wigmore Hall, by international artists including Gerald Finley, Dawn Upshaw, Sir Thomas Allen, the Vertavo String Quartet and BBC orchestras.
With a particular affinity for music for voice, Philips has been critically acclaimed for song settings of Emily Dickinson, e e cummings, Dylan Thomas and Langston Hughes among others, most recently a new cycle for baritone, cello and harp, Turning Fifty (2019) based on the poetry of Judith Wright. Love Songs for Mary Joyce (2016), commissioned by Wigmore Hall for tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Anna Tilbrook, sets a series of late love poems by John Clare. His choral music is similarly celebrated and is included in the Choirbook for the Queen (Church Music) as well as being commissioned for the BBC Proms (Sorrowfull Songes).
As Glyndebourne Opera’s first ever Composer-in-Residence, Philips completed two chamber operas in 2006-9: Followers, a site-specific promenade opera with a libretto by Simon Christmas, and The Yellow Sofa with a libretto by Edward Kemp, subsequently featured in Glyndebourne’s tour and shortlisted for a British Composer Award. The year-long development of Knight Crew was filmed by BBC Television and the resulting series, Gareth goes to Glyndebourne, aired in June 2010. Philips’ opera How the Whale Became, a collaboration with Edward Kemp, was based on Ted Hughes’s The Dreamfighter and other creation tales, and was written for the Royal Opera House’s Christmas 2013/14 season. His most recent full-length opera, The Tale of Januarie, was staged by the Guildhall School in Spring 2017, boasting perhaps the first libretto in Middle English by Stephen Plaice, and based on Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale. A new primary school children’s opera, Henny Penny (2021), offers its participants an immersive experience both in music and modern language learning, with versions in French (Cocotte Chocotte), German (Hennig Pfennig) and Spanish (Pollita Chiquita).
Ballet and opera are natural progressions for Philips, who already has an impressive track-record in composing for the theatre and has written two full-length ballets for choreographer Michael Corder and English National Ballet; a ballet based on Les Liaisons Dangereuses was followed by The Snow Queen in 2007. Symphonic works also form Philips’ oeuvre with All that remains commissioned to commemorate the centenary of the beginning of World War I receiving its world premiere by the National Orchestra of Belgium. Ballades Concertantes, for solo viola and double bass with chamber orchestra, premiered with Virginia Slater, Stacey Watton, and the Orchestra of the Swan in 2017, conducted by David Curtis.
A vital force in education, Philips is the Head of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama where he was made Honorary Fellow in 2007, and conferred a Professorship in 2014. He was responsible for the creation of both a new Masters Programme in Opera-Making & Writing and a Doctoral Composer-in-Residence scheme in association with the Royal Opera House.
Recent projects include a new oboe quintet, Through Silence (2020) for Wigmore Hall, and a set of folk song creative transcriptions, Melodys of Earth and Sky (2021), for violin and clarinet that draw on the two books of fiddle tunes collected by poet John Clare. The work was released on NMC Recordings in March 2022, reaching no 10 in the classical charts. In October 2022, The Country of Larks for tenor, horn and piano – a setting of Robert Louis Stevenson – receives its third performance at the Oxford Lieder Festival.
In August 2022, Julian Philips was featured composer at the Presteigne Festival, with six works featured including Barcarola for solo piano, Divertissement for chamber orchestra (based on his ballet score for Les Liaisons Dangereuses) and Looking West – a large-scale dramatic cantata for voices, actors and ensemble, (libretto by Rebecca Hurst), commissioned to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Other recent works include A Series of Strange Encounters for marimba and wind quintet, premiered by Evelyn Glennie at the Lake District Summer Music Festival in July 2023. Current projects include a series of John Clare settings for the vocal ensemble Exaudi and ongoing collaboration with the New London Chamber Ensemble, celebrating their 25th Anniversary, with a series of chamber works.

Parhelion from Looking West (2022)for soprano, mezzo soprano, actor & ensemble

Julian Philips Composer