Biography
Adam Gorb was born in 1958 and started composing at the age of ten. At fifteen he wrote a set of piano pieces – A Pianist’s Alphabet –of which a selection were performed on BBC Radio 3. In 1977 he went to Cambridge University to study music, where his teachers included Hugh Wood and Robin Holloway. After graduating in 1980 he divided his time between composition and working as a musician in the theatre. In 1987 he started studying privately with Paul Patterson, and then, from 1991 at the Royal, Academy of Music where he gained a MMus degree and graduated with the highest honours, including the Principal’s Prize in 1993.
Works include Metropolis for wind band, which has won several prizes including the Walter Beeler Memorial Prize in the USA in 1994 and is available on CD. Prelude, Interlude and Postlude for piano, won the Purcell Composition Prize in 1995, Kol Simcha, a ballet given over fifty performances by the Rambert Dance Company and Awayday for Wind Band which has had over a thousand performances since its premiere in 1996 and has been commercially recorded several times. A Violin Sonata was premiered at the Spitalfields Festival in London in 1996, Reconciliation for Clarinet and Piano was commissioned for the Park Lane Young Artists New Year series in 1998, and Elements, a Percussion Concerto written for Evelyn Glennie and the Royal Northern College of Music Wind Ensemble in 1998 was released on CD in 2001.
Since 1999 premieres have included a Clarinet Concerto for Nicholas Cox and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Weimar for chamber ensemble, also in 2000 and Downtown Diversions, a trombone concerto, at the CBDNA conference in Texas in February 2001. Recent works include String quartet no. 1 for the Maggini Quartet that was premiered at Bromsgrove music club in February 2002, Straitjacket for tuba and piano for James Gourlay, and Towards Nirvana, which received its first performance by the Tokyo Kosei Wind Ensemble in October 2002. Diaspora for eleven strings was given its premiere by the Goldberg Ensemble conducted by Malcolm Layfield at their contemporary music festival at the RNCM in February 2003, and November 2003 saw the first performance of Dances From Crete at the Royal College of Music in London.
Recent works include La Cloche Felee for soprano and piano at the Purcell Room, French Dances Revisited for chamber winds in Minneapolis, USA, Burlesque for the British clarinet choir and Freedom for oboe and harp for Melinda Maxwell.
In December 2004 Towards Nirvana won a British Composer Award in the category for Wind and Brass. February 2005 saw the Japanese premiere of Weimar. In 2006 two new orchestral works were premiered: Awakening by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, and Silk Impressions by the King Edward orchestra in Macclesfield. Adrenaline City was given its first performances by the US Air Force Academy Band in March 2006. Future commissions include a work for the John Armitage Memorial Trust for the BBC Singers and ONYX Brass, Fasolt’s Revenge for the Texas Tech Tuba Ensemble, and pieces for Wind Ensembles in Singapore and Holland.
Adam Gorb is Head of School of Composition and Contemporary Music at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.