Rebecca Saunders

I

With her distinctive and intensely striking sonic language, Berlin-based British composer Rebecca Saunders is one of the foremost composers of our time. Born in London in 1967 into a family of professional musicians, she grew up surrounded by pianos and singers and began composing as a child. She studied composition with Nigel Osborne and Wolfgang Rihm in Edinburgh and Karlsruhe.

Saunders has received numerous honorary fellowships and international awards, including in 2024 the Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement from the Venice Biennale. In 2019 she became the 45th laureate of the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. Further international prizes include the Roche Commission, the Paul Hindemith Prize, four Royal Philharmonic Society Awards and five BASCA British Composer and Ivor Awards, the GEMA Music Prize for Instrumental Music, the Hans und Gertrud Zender Foundation Prize and the prestigious Mauricio Kagel Music Prize.

Recent seasons have seen major surveys of Saunders’ work as Composer in Residence at the Musikverein Vienna and the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg in the 2023/2024 season, the Lucerne Festival 2021, Casa da Musica Porto 2022 and Acht Brücken Festival Cologne 2023. Further portraits in 2025 included the chamber music Festival Les Volques in Nîmes.

II

Saunders is a composer with an exquisite sense of drama and large-scale form. She writes music that combines deeply physical sound worlds and nuanced sensual timbres with formidable structural clarity. Last season saw the widely celebrated premiere of Saunders’ first operatic work, Lash – Acts of Love, in June 2025 at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, directed by Dead Centre and starring the singers Anna Prohaska, Sarah Maria Sun, Noa Frenkel and the actor Katja Kolm. It is based on an original text by the visual artist and writer Ed Atkins, with whom she wrote the libretto. Her previous collaboration with Atkins, Us Dead Talk Love (2021), was an expressive and dramatic tour de force, and her new opera expands this earlier work on a massive scale.

Saunders music explores the direct physicality and sensuality of the listening experience. Numerous compositions specifically investigate the intimate tangibility of the body, as exemplified in works like Skin (2016), Skull (2022), Scar (2019), Wound (2022), Hauch (2018), Flesh (2018) and Bite (2016).

Her passionate interest in literature is illustrated in the setting of texts from various authors such as Samuel Beckett und James Joyce. The music often addresses psychographic portraits of individual protagonists, not just evident in her opera, Lash, but also in earlier works such as Yes (2017). This spatial composition, based on Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from the final chapter of Ulysses, was written for the extraordinary architectural spaces of both the Berlin Philharmonie and the St. Eustache Cathedral in Paris. Saunders’ exploration of the sculptural and spatial properties of organised sound is further illustrated in concert-installation compositions such as chroma I - XXIV (2003-2025) and Stasis/Stasis Kollektiv (2011/16), which are expansive spatial collages of up to twenty-eight chamber groups and prepared sound sources tailored to radically different architectural spaces. Insideout – Music for a Choreographic Installation (2003), created in collaboration with Sasha Waltz and the Schaubühne Berlin, was her first work for stage, and received over 100 international performances. A recent installation collage, both intimate and fragile, Rockaby, was created for the Kunstforum in Vienna in 2024 for musicians and 260 single music boxes from her personal collection.

III

Saunders’ fascination with the concertante form is exemplified in her triptych of concerto works, the violin concerto Still (2011), the trumpet concerto Alba (2015) and a double percussion concerto Void (2014). More recent concertante works are the piano concerto to an utterance and the epic 40-minute composition Wound in 2022 for ensemble and orchestra. A concerto for orchestra is planned for premier in Japan in 2027. A second triptych for large ensemble includes Skin (2016), Scar (2018/2019) and Skull (2023), which was performed in its entirety at the Cologne Philharmonie by Ensemble Modern and by Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris. Close association with these and other international contemporary music ensembles, such as Klangforum Vienna und Ensemble Musikfabrik, is key to her creative work.

Saunders’ seeks close collaborative dialogue with contemporary artists in an array of different fields. In 2016, her extended violin concerto Still – choreographic version (2011/16) was a collaboration with the choreographer Antonio Rúz, the dancers of Sasha Waltz & Guests, Carolin Widmann, the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie and Sylvain Cambreling.

The double bass concerto Fury II (2009) was choreographed by Emanuel Gat for the Avignon Festival, and then in 2024 a new musical collage, Hauch#2 – music for dance, was created with the choreographer Rafaële Giovanola and received its premier with the Cocoon Dance Company at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg.

The installation Myriad (2017) of 2646 music boxes was created in collaboration with the Architecture and Landscape Architecture office, Topotek 1, for the Architecture Biennale Shenzhen, and was concurrently exhibited in Hong Kong and Gwangjiu. Saunders then developed the concert-installation Myriad I-III (2015-2023), which was performed and exhibited at the Schwetzingen Festspiele, the Sommerliche Musiktage Hitzacker, ZKM Karlsruhe, Radialsystem Berlin and Sankt Peters Cologne. Music for Moving Picture 946-3 (2021) was a collaboration with visual artist Gerhard Richter, the film maker Corinne Belz and the trumpeter Marco Blaauw.

Saunders received Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Edinburgh and Huddersfield and is a member of the Academies of Arts in Berlin, Dresden and Munich. She lives in Berlin and her works are published by Edition Peters, part of Wise Music Group.