Piers Hellawell

"Hellawell’s is an alert, engaging, absorbingly intelligent musical mind”, wrote Michael Oliver of International Record Review. At the age of 24 Piers Hellawell was appointed composer-in-residence at Queen’s University of Belfast, an institution with which he continued to associate himself throughout his professional career; since 2002 he has held the Chair of Composition at the University and from 2000 to 2003 he was also Gresham Professor of Music, a visiting post in the City of London. Retiring from Queen’s University in 2024, Hellawell was appointed Visiting Professor of Composition at St Andrews University.

He has been commissioned by the BBC Proms, Hilliard Ensemble, Schubert Ensemble of London and Stockholm Kammarbrass, and his music has been performed at numerous British and overseas festivals. Other collaborators have included Michala Petri, Evelyn Glennie, Psappha, Gould Piano Trio, the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra in Finland, BBC Philharmonic, RTÉ Vanbrugh String Quartet and Trio Medieval.

In 1999 Inside Story was premiered to wide acclaim at the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts; a CD featuring Inside Story alongside other recent major works appeared in 2002 on the Metronome Label and was named a BBC Music Magazine CD of the Month. 2002 also saw the premiere of The Pear Tree of Nicostratus, by the Hilliard Ensemble and the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra, at Finland’s Kaustinen Festival, where Hellawell was featured in a major retrospective. In 2004 Hellawell’s Cors de chasse received its world premiere at the Brighton Festival, given by Håkan Hardenberger, Jonas Bylund and the Philharmonia Orchestra, receiving its London premiere at the Southbank in 2006. Hellawell’s set for vocal ensemble, The Hilliard Songbook, which gave rise to the Hilliard Ensemble’s ECM album of that name in 1996, is, in the words of The Independent, ‘one of the most enduring of their many commissions’. In 2004 it was part of the Hilliard’s 30th Anniversary celebration events when the set, which has been performed across the world by the Hilliard, opened their 30th Anniversary series in the Wigmore Hall, and it was part of their farewell concert there.

Hellawell extended his series of concertante works in 2008 with Agricolas, for Robert Plane (clarinet) and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, premiered at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival and described by The Scotsman in its premiere recording as a "gorgeously impassioned work..... a rich kaleidoscope of inspired creativity". Piani, Latebre for piano was premiered by William Howard at the 2010 Spitalfields Festival, London while Hellawell’s most ambitious concertante venture may be Syzygy, a commission for Swedish Chamber Orchestra and Stockholm Kammarbrass premiered in spring 2013, whose composition was supported by a Leverhulme Fellowship. 2015 saw work on Wild Flow, a major orchestral commission premiered at the 2016 BBC Proms in London - while a PRS Foundation Beyond Borders award supported the 2016 collaboration Up By The Roots with Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey and Fidelio Trio, with whom Hellawell has a long association, during a UK tour. Other events marking Hellawell’s 60th birthday in 2016 included a residency at the Great Lakes Festival in Detroit USA in June and works at the Cheltenham International Festival in July.

Great Lakes Festival was the start of an association with the San Francisco quartet Friction, who have performed Hellawell's two earlier string quartets and commissioned a third, Family Group with Aliens, which they premiered in August 2019 in San Francisco. Other recent major works are Symphonies in Chains, premiered by the Ulster Orchestra in January 2020, and Rapprochement (Concerto for Piano Into Orchestra), written for Clare Hammond, which was premiered in Belfast in 2023.

Hellawell’s works are represented on the ECM (New Series), NMC and Metier labels as well as on three critically acclaimed discs of his music from the Metronome label, from 1998, 2002 and 2008; May 2012 saw the issue of ‘Airs, Waters’, Hellawell’s first recording on the Delphian label; 'Tempo' magazine praised the disc for "music of great humanity... a first-rate musical imagination."  A Major Individual Award from the Arts Council of NI in 2017 and a Composers Award from the PRS Foundation in 2018 led to release of the disc 'Up by the Roots', Hellawell’s second on the Delphian label, which was among the Sunday Times’ list of CDs Of The Year in 2020; along with the title work and Proms commission Wild Flow, this disc includes Ground Truthing (2017) for quintet, and works for solo piano and for cello and piano.

Hellawell’s main projects of 2024 were an octet Anklang for the Slovak group Quasars (2025) and The Rising of Sirius, a commission from Gould Piano Trio for their celebrations in 2025, with clarinettist Robert Plane, of the 1350^th anniversary of St Wilfrid’s founding of Hexham Abbey and St Andrew’s Church, Corbridge.