Deborah Pritchard

Deborah Pritchard is an award-winning British composer known for her concert works and synaesthesia. The BBC National Orchestra of Wales premiered her large orchestral piece The Angel Standing in the Sun in 2016, she won a British Composer Award for her solo violin piece Inside Colour in 2017 and her new violin concerto Calandra was premiered by Jennifer Pike and the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican in 2022. Her music has been performed worldwide by ensembles including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, London Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Philharmonia, Royal Northern Sinfonia, BBC Singers, Gesualdo Six and the Choir of New College Oxford and soloists including Natalie Clein, Nicola Benedetti and Tina Thing Helseth. She has been broadcast by BBC Radio 3, Radio 4 and commercially released by NMC, Signum, Nimbus, BIS, Hyperion, Orchid Classics and Linn Records.

As a synaesthetic composer Pritchard has written in response to the artworks of Wassily Kandinsky, JMW Turner, Marc Chagall and contemporary artists Maggi Hambling, Hughie O’Donoghue and Icelandic sculptor Steinunn Thorarinsdottir. She recently delivered a lecture at the United Nations, New York on the Marc Chagall Peace Window and her solo cello piece Radiance, written in response. Her violin concerto Wall of Water, after the paintings by Maggi Hambling, was performed at the National Gallery in 2015 by violinist Harriet Mackenzie and the English String Orchestra as Hambling exhibited, reviewed by Gramophone as a ‘work that will take one’s breath away’. She also paints music and created a series of music maps for the London Sinfonietta, described in The Times as ‘beautifully illustrated...paying visual homage to those wonderful medieval maps of the world.’
Deborah received her undergraduate degree from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she completed her MMus degree in composition at the Royal Academy of Music with Simon Bainbridge and was awarded her DPhil from Worcester College, Oxford where she studied with Robert Saxton, now holding Associate Membership of The Faculty of Music, Oxford. She was made Associate of the Royal Academy of Music in 2019 and held the tenure of Visiting Research Fellow at Keble College, Oxford from 2022-2023.