Ground-breaking Music Productions                      for Stage & Screen

From Shirley J. Thompson’s remarkable feature in a BBC TV documentary about her groundbreaking work as a Classical Composer in November 1985, Thompson was dubbed ‘A star in the world of music’ (Radio Times). With this dynamic start, she has continued to blaze a trail, writing music to mark historical moments and social change, making music representative of diverse cultures and communities and embracing different genres of music. Thompson represents the melting pot that is classical music where connections are more important than differences, influencing many persons to become composers and attracting large, diverse audiences to the concert halls around the world.

Thompson is considered to be the first woman in Europe to have composed and conducted a symphony within the last 40 years, New Nation Rising: A 21st Century Symphony (Classic FM Magazine), having set her up her own orchestra in 1994, The Shirley Thompson Ensemble, where she honed her skills in orchestration, performing frequently at the South Bank Centre.  She created the ‘First People’s Opera’ (ITV News) in 1997, a full-length opera that showed Victorian London as a culturally diverse city and merging operatic practices with the musicals stage. With Thompson’s Heroines of Opera she continued her Hidden Histories project through the operatic stage, ignited in 1990 with an experimental music/film (she is also a trained film-maker) about the famous 18th century, violinist,  George Polgreen Bridgtower, for whom Beethoven had composed the famous Kreutzer Sonata.

Thompson’s Heroines of Opera series include multiple large and medium scale operas with the theme of highlighting iconic historical characters. These multimedia chamber operas, feature strong, assertive, female protagonists (a conscious counter to most women’s roles in the traditional opera canon) and a focus on colonial and postcolonial (in these cases, specifically African Caribbean) narratives told from the point of view of those not traditionally the subject of opera. Opera works such as The Woman Who Refused to Dance, Sacred Mountain: Incidents in the Life of queen Nanny of the Maroons, Dido Elizabeth Belle, and Women of the Windrush etc all explore particular musical and performative solutions to achieve their goals.

Thompson co-scored the most performed contemporary ballet of recent times. Starring Sylvie Guillem and the choreographer/dance, Russell Maliphant, the multi-award-winning ballet toured for 15 years to over 40 countries including: Sadler’s Wells and London Coliseum, England; Theater Heilbronn, Germany; Athens Arena, Greece; Le Metropole, Lausanne, Switzerland; Opera de Lyon, Theater Champs-Elysees, Odyssud Theatre (Toulouse) France; Teatro Comunale, (Modena); Teatro Arcimboldi (Milan); Auditorium Conciliazone di Roma (Rome); Teatro alla Fenice (Venice); San Carlo (Naples) Italy; Teatro Real (Madrid) Spain; Moscow State Opera House (Russia); St George’s Theatre, New Zealand; Sydney Opera House, Australia, City Center, New York, USA and Marinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, Russia. Thompson has won multiple awards for her work.