Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade is a British composer and cellist based in Edinburgh, whose imaginative compositions range from chamber music to song cycles, choral works and orchestral works. Her new Piano Concerto receives its premiere on 21 February 2025 at BBC Hoddinott Hall in Cardiff, performed by soloist Clare Hammond and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales: a co-commission between BBC Radio 3 and the Royal Philharmonic Society, with support from the John Ellerman Foundation.

We ardently believe Ninfea is a composer worth discovering, with music so worth hearing. We want to encourage wider audiences to embrace her music, and more colleagues to commission and programme it. As an RPS Featured Composer, this year we will share and amplify Ninfea’s story, her music, and her life as a composer through films, playlists and interviews.

We invite you to join us as we explore fresh ways to rouse recognition for composers, and ignite opportunities for music-lovers to get to know them and their music more widely online, in concert halls nationwide, and through broadcasts. In this, we develop our tradition of commissioning composers dating back to Beethoven and Mendelssohn, and more recently Alex Paxton, Charlotte Bray, Cecilia McDowall, Daniel Kidane, Julian Anderson, Kareen Roustom, Thea Musgrave, Tom Coult and many more. Discover more about our work supporting composers at key stages in their careers here. 

Ninfea’s music abounds a wealth of influences – ideal touchstones to inspire and engage audiences. Often inspired by text, she was composer in residence at Glyndebourne from 2019-2022 and her works include a song cycle based on letters by the art nouveau illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, a work for chamber ensemble and narrator with satirical texts by the Edwardian writer Saki, and a choral setting of a sonnet by contemporary Scottish poet Don Paterson. Excitingly, she is currently working on an abridged adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s much-loved Under Milk Wood for Spitalfields Music Festival, and she has enjoyed a fruitful association with audiences at Presteigne Festival in Wales, as their ‘Evolve’ composer from 2020-25.

Seeking new influences and inspirations is essential to Ninfea. Her music is vibrantly enhanced by her work as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Durham University. Her current research will culminate in her writing three rāg-focused chamber compositions combining Western and North Indian instruments. She wrote Patdeep Studies for RPS Award-winning sitar player Jasdeep Singh Degun in 2021, and continues to study the instrument having taken sitar lessons herself with Jasdeep. Other notable works include Three études for piano and flower pots, commissioned by Psappha Ensemble, and Table Talk, a large brass work she was commissioned to write following her 2017 composition fellowship with Tanglewood Music Center in the United States. 

We invite you to take a walk into Ninfea’s soundworld.

NINFEA’S KEY WORKS– click here to watch and listen to recordings of some of the works detailed above, and more, on a dedicated Key Works page, each with an introduction in Ninfea’s own words.

NINFEA’S PLAYLIST– click here for a playlist, specially made for the RPS by Ninfea, revealing some of the inspirations and influences that shape her music-making.

As an RPS Featured Composer, we will be collaborating with Ninfea over the coming months to share further insights into her music with you. We warmly encourage you to follow her story here and on our social media @RoyalPhilSoc. We would love to hear your impressions of Ninfea’s music and, if you’d like to know more about her or connect with her, please do get in touch.

We are grateful to the John Ellerman Foundation for funding which enables us to support Ninfea’s Piano Concerto and share her story with you. If you enjoy making musical discoveries, we invite you to consider becoming an RPS Member which brings you closer to music and musicians while directly helping more composers like Ninfea to create captivating music. It starts from just £5 a month and you can find out more about RPS Membership here. Together, we can ensure classical music thrives for years to come.