Tarik O’Regan

2020/21 sees the release of three albums of O’Regan’s compositions: Pentatone brings out Houston Grand Opera’s production of The Phoenix, in which Thomas Hampson and Luca Pisaroni both interpret the role of Lorenzo Da Ponte; on Naxos, Chamber Choir Ireland and the Irish Chamber Orchestra perform A Letter of Rights, a large-scale collaboration with Alice Goodman which meditates on the civil rights enshrined in Magna Carta; and All Things Common is a portrait album by Pacific Chorale on the Yarlung label. He is currently working on a saxophone concerto, which has been commissioned for soloist Amy Dickson by the Presteigne Festival to be premiered in 2022. 

O’Regan’s music is described as “exquisite and delicate” (The Washington Post); “beautifully-imagined, holding the audience rapt” (The Financial Times); “sublime: a piece that you didn’t want to end” (The Times, London); and generating “previously unheard sound worlds with astonishing effect” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).  

Born in 1978, Tarik O’Regan has worked with a wide variety of ensembles and organizations; these include the Dutch National Ballet, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Australian Chamber Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Sydney Dance Company, BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, and the Royal Opera House in London.  

Recorded on over 40 albums and published exclusively by Novello, his work has regularly receives many recognitions: two GRAMMY® nominations (including Best Classical Album,) and both New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer Best Classical Releases of the Year for Threshold of Night; the NEA Artistic Excellence Award and a South Bank Sky Arts Award nomination for Heart of Darkness; a Gramophone Award nomination for Scattered Rhymes; two British Composer Awards; Time Out London (Top Five Concerts of the Year), WQXR/Q2 (CD of the Week) and WNYC (Pick of the Week).

“One of the leading British composers of his generation” (Gramophone) who is writing “music of startling beauty” (The Observer), Tarik O’Regan was born in London in 1978. He grew up predominantly in Croydon, South London, spending some of his childhood in Morocco, where his mother was born, and in Algeria. Following the completion of his undergraduate studies at Pembroke College, Oxford, and private study with Jeremy Dale Roberts, he began serving as the classical recordings reviewer for The Observer newspaper, a position he held for four years. During part of this time he also worked for investment bank JPMorgan Chase. O’Regan then continued his postgraduate studies in composition under the direction of both Robin Holloway at Cambridge University, where he was appointed Composer-in-Residence at Corpus Christi College, and Robert Saxton.  

O’Regan has been appointed to the Fulbright Chester Schirmer Fellowship at Columbia University; a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard; and positions at Trinity and Corpus Christi Colleges in Cambridge, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Yale. He has served on the composition faculty of Rutgers University, and as Senior Advisor to the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University. A frequent television and radio broadcaster, O’Regan has written and presented two documentaries for BBC Radio 4: Composing LA and Composing New York. In 2017, he was elected to an Honorary Fellowship of Pembroke College, Oxford and to the board of Yaddo, one of the oldest artist communities in the USA. O’Regan currently holds the positions of Visiting Artist at Stanford University and Artistic Partner with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale.