Sarah Rodgers Recordings
Sarah is a direct descendant of the family of English composer Henry Purcell. She read music at Nottingham University where she first developed her interest in music of other Cultures and made a specialist study of Balinese gamelan music. Later, whilst working with VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas), she collected West African folk songs in Sierra Leone.
The Roaring Whirl was the first of a number of commissions for cross-cultural work including Ramayana, a wind sextet based on Balinese chant composed for Sounds Positive and Saigyo, a concerto grosso using Japanese shakuhachi and Indian bansuri as the solo instruments commissioned for the City of London Sinfonia, which she also conducted. Spring Palace Song was composed for the award-winning girls’ chorus, Cantamus, which they performed as gold-medal winners at the Beijing Choral Olympics in 2009.
In addition to these cross-cultural interests, Sarah has been commissioned to write music for orchestra, chorus, chamber groups, and soloists. Her setting of Ruskin’s fable, The King of the Golden River, for tenor and string quartet, was commissioned for the Ruskin 2000 celebrations and is one of a number of recordings available on Spotify.
Sarah was a featured British composer for a cultural exchange between the Union of Soviet Composers and the Composers’ Guild of Great Britain, an organisation to which she was later elected chair. She subsequently became chairman of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composer and Authors during which tenure she established the British Composer Awards, leading them for their first 11 years.
As a composer, Sarah likes to respond to every kind of creative proposal that comes her way and in recent times this has included a commission for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, a collaboration with the actor Michael Palin, presentations with Geraldine Allen on Music and Spirituality at Wesley House Cambridge, original hymn settings for her publishers Stainer & Bell and new music for the Spitalfields Festival. www.sarahrodgers.com
