The opening song from a cycle of five Judith Wright settings for baritone, harp and cello. Performed by James Newby (baritone), Oliver Wass (harp) and Leo Popplewell (cello).

'Breath' from Turning Fifty (2019)

Barcarola is a 15-minute work for solo piano. It seeks to reinhabit the world of the 19th century Barcarolle as typified by Chopin, Liszt or Fauré, exploring the genre's distinctive motion, figurative patterns, and its formal tropes and poetic associations. On the surface, an imagined boat song – underneath a morbid, dark undertow. Barcarola is dedicated to pianist Dominic Degavino.

Completed in September 2019, Barcarola was premiered on 25 November 2019 by Dominic Degavino as part of a 50th birthday concert for Julian Philips, held at the Milton Court Concert Hall in London.

Barcarola (2019) for solo piano (extract)

Cast in two contrasting movements, Julian Philips's Winter Music is a study for solo harp, imbued with colouristic and timbral associations from the season of winter. The first movement is spacious and predominantly soft, patterning harp figurations out of a slow unfolding of pitch. This process is then reconfigured in the faster and more rhythmic second movement, where cycles of repeating notes gradually warm and colour the harmonic palette, culminating in a fleeting vision of spring in the work’s closing gestures.

Winter Music was commissioned with funds made available by the Tanza Trust and is dedicated to harpist Oliver Wass, who premiered the piece at St John’s Smith Square, London, on 26 October 2017.

Winter Music (2017), Second Movement

'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

'No Promise of Return' - an extract from Looking West (2022), performed by mezzo soprano Rebecca Afonwy-Jones, with actor Alex Knox and 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.

No Promise of Return, from Looking West (2022) for soprano, mezzo soprano, actor & ensemble

A suite for chamber orchestra extracted from the full-length ballet 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses'. The suite incorporates a sequence of Rameau creative transcriptions in which the Premier Danseur, Danceny features as well as intimate scenes with Cecile. 

Divertissement is performed here by the Presteigne Festival Orchestra, conducted by George Vass.

Divertissement (2004) for chamber orchestra

An extract from Julian Philips' opera 'The Tale of Januarie', staged by the Guildhall School in 2017, directed by Martin Lloyd-Evans and conducted by Dominic Wheeler.

'The Tale of Januarie' was adapted from Chaucer's 'The Merchant's Tale' by writer Stephen Plaice, the libretto conceived entirely in Chaucerian Middle-English. The opera is for full resources, including an array of medieval instruments from bagpipes to a symphony.

The action is mapped out across the cycle of the seasons, and this extract marks the arrival of Spring. Three nymphes arise from the underworld, closely followed by the squabbling gods, Pluto and Proserpina.

Spring from The Tale Of Januarie (2017)

Cocotte Chocotte is a Primary School opera that brings together music and modern language learning. The libretto by Stephen Plaice is based on the Henny Penny story - a chicken, knocked on the head by a falling acorn on a windy day, decides the sky is falling in. She rounds up her feathered friends to go and inform the King, but unfortunately the fox, Rene Renard, gets to her first.

In this aria, sung here by soprano Anna Denis, Coquotte Chocotte is in shock from her bang on the head, but remembers her mother's advice, and decides to go and find the king.

In this performance, the opera is sung in French (Coquotte Chocotte), but there are parallel versions in English (Henny Penny), Spanish (Polita Chiquita) and German (Hennig Pfennig).

An animated film of Cocotte Chocotte has been developed together with the company Positive Note, with puppetry and design by Jeremy Bidgood.

La Chanson de Cocotte Chocotte from 'Cocotte Chocotte' (2020)

Cocotte Chocotte is a Primary School opera that brings together music and modern language learning. The libretto by Stephen Plaice is based on the Henny Penny story - a chicken, knocked on the head by a falling acorn on a windy day, decides the sky is falling in. She rounds up her feathered friends to go and inform the King, but unfortunately the fox, Rene Renard, gets to her first.

In this aria, sung here by tenor Daniel Norman, Rene Renard having encountered Coquotte Chocotte and her fowl friends, persuades them to let him show them the way to the King. He puts on his most suave and seductive face, but occasionally his atavistic hunger breaks through the mask.

In this performance, the opera is sung in French (Coquotte Chocotte), but there are parallel versions in English (Henny Penny), Spanish (Polita Chiquita) and German (Hennig Pfennig).

An animated film of Cocotte Chocotte has been developed together with the company Positive Note, with puppetry and design by Jeremy Bidgood.

La Chanson de René Renard from 'Coquotte Chocotte' (2020)

'I've wandered many a weary mile' is performed in this recording by Liam Bonthrone (tenor) and Laura Roberts (piano), the final song of a cycle of John Clare Settings, 'Love Songs for Mary Joyce'.

On the 20th July 1841 poet John Clare escaped from High Beach private asylum in Epping Forest and with the help of gypsies, walked over four days back to his roots in rural Northamptonshire. Travelling virtually barefoot, with little more than a crust of bread or even grass to eat, Clare was desperately searching – in part for his lost childhood, but more importantly for his first love, Mary Joyce, the poetic muse of these troubled later years, whose memory inspired Clare to produce a substantial body of lyric poetry, despite his ever deteriorating mental state.

Clare captured his experience in an extraordinary autobiographical account, Recollections of Journey from Essex, powerful for its unremitting and harrowing honesty. Love Songs for Mary Joyce is the first in a series of creative responses, which renders six of Clare’s Mary poems as a cycle, mapped out against the events of his Journey from Essex, which become an underlying narrative frame. 

Four of the six Clare poems chosen were clearly conceived as words without songs and the approach here has been to suspend them on musical lines, which respect the clear surface patterns of the lyrics while exploring the irregularities that lie beneath.  In these ‘songs’ – numbers 2, 3, 4 and 6 – the tenor voice follows his line as Clare followed his road, embedded in musical landscapes that shift and change like the weather. 

Songs 1 and 6 function more as art songs – Say What is Love declaring the cycle’s subject as a kind of preface. Song 5, It is the evening hour, is perhaps the most ‘sophisticated’ of the six poems, and the musical response is closer to German romantic song, haunted by the uncannily close contemporaneity of Clare’s Mary poems with Schumann’s year of song (1840) in which the Heine Liederkreis op 24 was completed.

Real-time events intrude just once: in song 3, where the three stanzas of I sleep with thee, and wake with thee are broken by two prose fragments from Clare’s ‘Recollections', describing a troubled night of sleep on the 20th July 1841. Here Mary Joyce is referred to as Clare’s ‘first wife’, Clare wrongly imagining that he’d married her. His actual wife, Patty, was to find her husband at the end of his journey on the 23rd July, crippled and scarcely able to walk, taking him back in her cart to their cottage in Northborough. There Clare found no trace of Mary Joyce, unaware that she had perished in a house fire on the 14th July 1838.

Love Songs for Mary Joyce is dedicated with affection to my dear friends Felicity Edholm and Jeremy Macdonald; it was commissioned for tenor James Gilchrist, by the Wigmore Hall with the support of André Hoffmann, President of the Fondation Hoffmann, a Swiss grant-making foundation.

'I've wandered many A weary mile' from Love Songs for Mary Joyce (2016)

'It is the evening hour' is performed in this recording by Liam Bonthrone (tenor) and Laura Roberts (piano), the fifth song of a cycle of John Clare Settings, 'Love Songs for Mary Joyce'.

On the 20th July 1841 poet John Clare escaped from High Beach private asylum in Epping Forest and with the help of gypsies, walked over four days back to his roots in rural Northamptonshire. Travelling virtually barefoot, with little more than a crust of bread or even grass to eat, Clare was desperately searching – in part for his lost childhood, but more importantly for his first love, Mary Joyce, the poetic muse of these troubled later years, whose memory inspired Clare to produce a substantial body of lyric poetry, despite his ever deteriorating mental state.

Clare captured his experience in an extraordinary autobiographical account, Recollections of Journey from Essex, powerful for its unremitting and harrowing honesty. Love Songs for Mary Joyce is the first in a series of creative responses, which renders six of Clare’s Mary poems as a cycle, mapped out against the events of his Journey from Essex, which become an underlying narrative frame. 

Four of the six Clare poems chosen were clearly conceived as words without songs and the approach here has been to suspend them on musical lines, which respect the clear surface patterns of the lyrics while exploring the irregularities that lie beneath.  In these ‘songs’ – numbers 2, 3, 4 and 6 – the tenor voice follows his line as Clare followed his road, embedded in musical landscapes that shift and change like the weather. 

Songs 1 and 6 function more as art songs – Say What is Love declaring the cycle’s subject as a kind of preface. Song 5, It is the evening hour, is perhaps the most ‘sophisticated’ of the six poems, and the musical response is closer to German romantic song, haunted by the uncannily close contemporaneity of Clare’s Mary poems with Schumann’s year of song (1840) in which the Heine Liederkreis op 24 was completed.

Real-time events intrude just once: in song 3, where the three stanzas of I sleep with thee, and wake with thee are broken by two prose fragments from Clare’s ‘Recollections', describing a troubled night of sleep on the 20th July 1841. Here Mary Joyce is referred to as Clare’s ‘first wife’, Clare wrongly imagining that he’d married her. His actual wife, Patty, was to find her husband at the end of his journey on the 23rd July, crippled and scarcely able to walk, taking him back in her cart to their cottage in Northborough. There Clare found no trace of Mary Joyce, unaware that she had perished in a house fire on the 14th July 1838.

Love Songs for Mary Joyce is dedicated with affection to my dear friends Felicity Edholm and Jeremy Macdonald; it was commissioned for tenor James Gilchrist, by the Wigmore Hall with the support of André Hoffmann, President of the Fondation Hoffmann, a Swiss grant-making foundation.

'It is the evening hour' from Love Songs for Mary Joyce (2016)

I've wandered many a weary mile is performed in this recording by Liam Bonthrone (tenor) and Laura Roberts (piano), the second song of a cycle of John Clare Settings, 'Love Songs for Mary Joyce'.

On the 20th July 1841 poet John Clare escaped from High Beach private asylum in Epping Forest and with the help of gypsies, walked over four days back to his roots in rural Northamptonshire. Travelling virtually barefoot, with little more than a crust of bread or even grass to eat, Clare was desperately searching – in part for his lost childhood, but more importantly for his first love, Mary Joyce, the poetic muse of these troubled later years, whose memory inspired Clare to produce a substantial body of lyric poetry, despite his ever deteriorating mental state.

Clare captured his experience in an extraordinary autobiographical account, Recollections of Journey from Essex, powerful for its unremitting and harrowing honesty. Love Songs for Mary Joyce is the first in a series of creative responses, which renders six of Clare’s Mary poems as a cycle, mapped out against the events of his Journey from Essex, which become an underlying narrative frame. 

Four of the six Clare poems chosen were clearly conceived as words without songs and the approach here has been to suspend them on musical lines, which respect the clear surface patterns of the lyrics while exploring the irregularities that lie beneath.  In these ‘songs’ – numbers 2, 3, 4 and 6 – the tenor voice follows his line as Clare followed his road, embedded in musical landscapes that shift and change like the weather. 

Songs 1 and 6 function more as art songs – Say What is Love declaring the cycle’s subject as a kind of preface. Song 5, It is the evening hour, is perhaps the most ‘sophisticated’ of the six poems, and the musical response is closer to German romantic song, haunted by the uncannily close contemporaneity of Clare’s Mary poems with Schumann’s year of song (1840) in which the Heine Liederkreis op 24 was completed.

Real-time events intrude just once: in song 3, where the three stanzas of I sleep with thee, and wake with thee are broken by two prose fragments from Clare’s ‘Recollections', describing a troubled night of sleep on the 20th July 1841. Here Mary Joyce is referred to as Clare’s ‘first wife’, Clare wrongly imagining that he’d married her. His actual wife, Patty, was to find her husband at the end of his journey on the 23rd July, crippled and scarcely able to walk, taking him back in her cart to their cottage in Northborough. There Clare found no trace of Mary Joyce, unaware that she had perished in a house fire on the 14th July 1838.

Love Songs for Mary Joyce is dedicated with affection to my dear friends Felicity Edholm and Jeremy Macdonald; it was commissioned for tenor James Gilchrist, by the Wigmore Hall with the support of André Hoffmann, President of the Fondation Hoffmann, a Swiss grant-making foundation.

'The spring may forget' from Love Songs for Mary Joyce (2016)

An extract from Julian Philips' opera 'The Tale of Januarie', staged by the Guildhall School in 2017, directed by Martin Lloyd-Evans and conducted by Dominic Wheeler.

'The Tale of Januarie' was adapted from Chaucer's 'The Merchant's Tale' by writer Stephen Plaice, the libretto conceived entirely in Chaucerian Middle-English. The opera is for full resources, including an array of medieval instruments from bagpipes to a symphony.

Here the young, love-sick knave, Damyan, expresses his hopeless love for May, just married to the aged Knight Januarie, in his aria 'There nys noon payne as hope profaned'. Damyan is played here by baritone Dominic Sedgwick.

Damyan's Aria from 'The Tale of Januarie' (2017)

An extract from Julian Philips' opera 'The Tale of Januarie', staged by the Guildhall School in 2017, directed by Martin Lloyd-Evans and conducted by Dominic Wheeler.

'The Tale of Januarie' was adapted from Chaucer's 'The Merchant's Tale' by writer Stephen Plaice, the libretto conceived entirely in Chaucerian Middle-English. The opera is for full resources, including an array of medieval instruments from bagpipes to a symphony.

Here the young May escapes her husband Januarie, by locking herself in the privee. Januarie can be heard repeatedly calling her off-stage, but May is engrossed in the love note from the knave, Damyan. In the ensuing aria May defies everyone who has looked down on her, and expresses her longing for Damyan.

May's privee aria from 'The Tale of Januarie' (2017)

A setting of George Herbert's poem 'Vertue' for choir and organ, sung here by the choir of Clare College Cambridge, conducted by Timothy Brown. Completed in 1988, 'Vertue' is just about the only work that survives from my student composer days.

Julian Philips

Vertue (1988)

Sextet for piano and winds was completed in May 1999, and commissioned by that year's Warwick and Leamington Festival, with funds from West Midlands Arts.  The work is dedicated to Richard Phillips, as a token of gratitude for his tireless support of new music, and inspired by the extraordinary playing of pianist Andrew Ball.

Cast in three movements, the Sextet lasts approximately 16 minutes.  Much of its musical argument is pithy and concentrated, its ideas fleeting and brief.  The instrumental texture throughout is clearly stratified, allowing for piano sonorities to weave in and out of the wind, sometimes blending, sometimes contrasting.

While neither of the two outer movements exceeds four minutes in length, the central movement is far more substantial, combining scherzo and slow movement into a single span.  Both blocks of material here are based on variation techniques, elements of both combined in a serene coda.

While the first movement builds drama out of the juxtaposition of an urgent rhythmic motif with a more lyrical theme, the finale consists of a series of "games", instigated by the french horn, whose inevitable arguments and tantrums are eventually transformed in a final song.

Julian Philips Sextet for piano & wind, third movement (1999)

Autumn Songs sets a sequence of five poems by Ted Hughes for soprano, baritone, children's voices and piano. The work was commissioned for the 2020 Little Missenden Festival, celebrating texts that the Festival commissioned from Ted Hughes back in 1968.

Song 2, The Seven Sorrows, explores deep autumnal melancholy, in a flowing setting for just soprano and baritone, here performed by Elizabeth Atherton (soprano), Dominic Sedgwick (baritone) and Iain Burndside (piano).

Autumn Songs (2020) - 2. The Seven Sorrows

A short orchestral work commissioned by the National Orchestra of Belgium as part of their commemorations for the First World War centenary. Premiered by the orchestra in October 2014, conducted by Hugh Wolff.

Julian Philips All That Remains (2014)

Composed for violist Maximillian Baillie and the Aurora Orchestra, the work charts the life cycle of a violist who metamorphoses into a dancer. Conceived with choreography by Mickael Marso Riviere.

Julian Philips Maxamorphosis (2012)

Ballades Concertantes developed out of an engagement with two different historical traditions – the late fourteenth century ‘Ballade’ of Guillaume de Machaut, and the later eighteenth century ‘Sinfonia Concertante’ as developed by Haydn, Mozart or Dittersdorf. Machaut because my recent Chaucer opera ‘The Tale of Januarie’ had engaged with late medieval music, and Machaut’s music was still in the air; the ‘Sinfonia Concertante’ because the Orchestra of the Swan was keen to celebrate its tenth anniversary by reviving a form which gives solo spots to individual orchestral players. In this case, the viola and double bass.

The piece thus presents four creative transcriptions of Machaut Ballades filtered through both my own imagination and the formal premise of the Sinfonia Concertante. From the Sinfonia Concertante comes an orchestral texture in which the solo viola and double bass are embedded, and also the four movement sinfonia design with a scherzo (movement 2), slow movement (movement 3) and almost a rondo finale. From the Machaut comes not only a particular sensibility about modal harmony, but also some of the plangent lyricism that fills his Ballades, which were after all songs of courtly love and amorous desire.

All four movements preserve the formal shape of the Machaut Ballades: two sections, the first repeated, the second longer, with certain phrases recurring like refrains. This third movement, based on the soulful 'Je ne cuit pas qu’oncques à creature' embellishes and transforms its Ballade source, preserving the design quite closely but expanding and enriching from the inside.

Ballades Concertantes was written to celebrate the Orchestra of the Swan’s 10th Anniversary and is dedicated to my friend and colleague, the composer and conductor James Weeks. The premiere soloists were violist Virginia Slater and double bassist Stacey Watton.

Ballades Concertantes, movement 3 'Je ne cuit pas' (2017)

A BBC Radio Three commission from 1995, sung by Helen Lothian with Simon Roland-Jones on viola. The text is by the little-known poet, Olive Fraser.

Coronach for mezzo-soprano and viola (1995)

'The Owl' from 'An Amherst Bestiary' (1997)

from Act 1 of my ballet, 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses'

'Valmont and Tourvel' from the ballet 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses' (2004)

from my ballet 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses"

Merteuil and Valmont - A pact is made from the ballet 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses' (2004)

A short cycle of eight songs, setting poems by Emily Dickinson which explore images and associations with the sea

Swift Partitions - Song 1

Swift Partitions - Song 2

Swift Partitions - Song 3

Swift Partitions - Song 4

Swift Partitions - Song 5

Swift Partitions - Song 6

Swift Partitions - Song 7

Swift Partitions - Song 8

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.

Popular tracks by Julian Philips Composer