Augusta Read Thomas’s music creates a powerfully dramatic sense of ‘lyricism under pressure’. Her compositional process often evolves from short motives which are expanded, contracted, and embellished harmonically or used themselves as the harmonic basis for new melodies. The result is a music of fascinating, complex textures with an urgent, forward-driving momentum. Thomas studied at Yale, and later at the Royal Academy of Music with William Karlins, Alan Stout and Jacob Druckman. Commissions from major American symphony orchestras in the 1990s, along with international performances by Rostropovich, Boulez, Barenboim, Knussen and Eschenbach sealed her reputation in the United States and beyond.

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