Robin Haigh
Irish/British composer Robin Haigh (b.1993) works internationally with leading orchestras and soloists, writing pieces of “scintillating unpredictability” (Tom Service, BBC Radio 3) that have also been described as “timeless,” “dream-like” (Musical Opinion Magazine), and “remarkably discombobulating” (Seen and Heard International). Haigh’s work first gained widespread attention in 2017, when his recorder quintet In Feyre Foreste won him a British Composer Award aged just 24, being described by the judges as “completely refreshing” and “magical.”
Recent years have seen Haigh produce a string of celebrated works for orchestra and large ensemble. The Britten Sinfonia commission Grin was honoured with a 2020 Ivor Novello Award, described by the judges as a “bold and original work with a highly distinctive musical language and sound.” Soon after, Haigh’s orchestral piece SLEEPTALKER made its debut at the Royal Festival Hall in a London Philharmonic Orchestra concert conducted by Jack Sheen and curated by Brett Dean to reflect composers' responses to the pandemic. The Telegraph’s Ivan Hewitt described the Ivor Novello-nominated piece as “an engagingly odd landscape of modernist fragments and other musical memories”, also writing that “the seriousness of all these composers [...] was an inspiration.”
Photograph by Michael Carlo, 2023.
