Marcus Tristan Heathcock

Marcus Tristan Heathcock was born in England and started composing at about 5 years old. He composed many early symphonic works, and the King Edward VI College Orchestra, in which he was the principal timpanist, won the 1987 National Festival of Music for Youth, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, with a performance of his Variations for Two Orchestras. He then went to the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he studied with Hans Werner Henze, Justin Connolly and Melanie Daiken. He received a GRSM (Hons) and an LRAM in Composition. An opera, composed with three other students of Henze, was performed at the 1989 International Opera Festival in Montepulciano. He also took private guidance from Olivier Messiaen. He has worked in the UK, Belgium and Romania, where he spent a semester lecturing at the Academy of Music in Cluj-Napoca. He has had many performances of symphonic and choral works in many of the major concert halls in the UK, most notably the Symphony Hall in Birmingham and the South Bank Centre in London. He has had a fruitful collaboration with the Fitzwilliam Quartet from the UK, who have played his music in the UK, the USA and in St Petersburg, Russia. They are planning in 2009 to finally perform a string quintet based on music by Gesualdo written back in 2005.Since 1995, he has partly lived and worked in Russia, becoming Associate Composer at the St Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra Klassika in 2004. They have already premiered five new symphonic works, including a work entitled Sinfonia di Benvenuto, designed for a programme containing Haydn’s Farewell Symphony and in which the players slowly return to the stage after having left it in the Haydn, and more recently his 8th symphony, a football-themed piece subtitled Playing Away, on January 28th 2007 at the Great Columned Hall in St Petersburg. The next work for the orchestra is a symphony tailored to fit into a programme of works by Jean Baptiste Lully. A 40-minute Symphony for Voices was composed for the Coro Odyssea choir in Lisbon in Portugal with support from the Gulbenkian Foundation. A recent commission that was premiered in Winchester Cathedral in December 2008 was a Christmas Song composed in collaboration with the poet Wendy Cope. Another recent commission was for a 40-part motet called Next to Nothing that will be premiered in the 2009 International Festival of British Music in St Petersburg alongside Tallis’ Spem in Alium.Marcus is currently engaged in a long-running opera project in collaboration with the Ancient Near East Dept of the British Museum about one of the last kings of Assyria Esarhaddon.