Tarik O'Regan

File:Tarikoregan.jpg

Tarik O’Regan
(photo credit: Suzanne Jansen)

Tarik Hamilton O'Regan (b. 1 January 1978, London) is a British composer living in New York City, USA.

Life and work

A British Composer Award winner Tarik O’Regan was educated at Whitgift School and then Pembroke College, Oxford, completing his postgraduate studies at Cambridge, where he was appointed Composer in Residence at Corpus Christi College.

Described as "beautifully-imagined" (The Financial Times, London), his compositions have been performed internationally by, among others, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, BBC Singers and Los Angeles Master Chorale.

O'Regan divides his time between Trinity College, Cambridge, where he is Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts, and New York City, where he moved in 2004 to take up the Chester Schirmer Fulbright Fellowship in Music Composition at Columbia University, and subsequently a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard.

O'Regan's current project, a chamber opera version of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness in collaboration with the artist Tom Phillips RA, is jointly in development in London with Royal Opera House OperaGenesis and in New York with American Opera Projects.

Press

O'Regan's 2006 debut disc, VOICES (Collegium Records COL CD 130), recorded by the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, was released to critical acclaim, heralding O’Regan as "one of the most original and eloquent of young composers" (The Observer, London), "breathing new life into the idiom" (The Daily Telegraph, London). International Record Review declared the recording "a committed, persuasive and highly accomplished performance of an exceptional composing voice of our time", while BBC Music Magazine gave the disc a double five-star rating.

A 2007 feature article in The Independent (London) by Michael Church stated that "O’Regan’s musical voice has a gritty freshness unlike that of anyone else."

Career highlights

• 1997 - received first commissions from the Choir of New College, Oxford (with their director Edward Higginbottom) and James Bowman
• 2000 - began supervising undergraduate music at University of Cambridge
• 2002 - London premieres of Clichés with the London Sinfonietta and The Pure Good of Theory with the BBC Symphony Orchestra
• 2003 - awarded Chester Schirmer Fulbright Fellowship and a Wingate Scholarship
• 2004 - moved to New York City to take up a Fulbright Fellowship at Columbia University and subsequenty a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard
• 2005 - commenced association with Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music as a Research Affiliate
• 2005 - Sainte (from New French Songs) was the winning work in the "Vocal" category of the 2005 British Composer Awards
• 2007 - appointed Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge

Tarik O'Regan: VOICES
(Collegium COL CD 130)

Publications

Tarik O'Regan’s earliest works were published by Oxford University Press and Sulasol; since 2004 his music has been exclusively published by ChesterNovello

• ChesterNovello catalogue
• Oxford University Press catalogue

External links

• Official website
• Publisher website

Miscellaneous

• Between 1999 and 2003, O'Regan served as the classical recordings reviewer for The Observer newspaper.
• An article in The Independent newspaper on April 26, 2007 stated that O’Regan spent some of his early childhood in Algeria.
• An article in The Daily Telegraph newspaper on April 28, 2007 quotes O'Regan as saying he’s "a pretty bad singer".

See also

• Andrew Caldecott (O'Regan's great grandfather)
• William Rowan Hamilton (O'Regan's great-great-great-grandfather)