Ground-breaking Music Productions                      for Stage & Screen

The often described as ‘magical music’ of Shirley J. Thompson first came to public notice with a feature about her ground-breaking work as a classical composer in a BBC TV documentary in November 1985, when Thompson was dubbed, ‘a star in the world of music’ (The Radio Times). With this dynamic start, she has continued to blaze a trail, writing music to mark royal occasions, historical events, 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 young persons to become composers and attracting large, diverse audiences to the concert halls and opera stages 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), and is a summation of having set up her own orchestra in 1994, The Shirley Thompson Ensemble, where she honed her skills in orchestration over many years, performing frequently at the South Bank Centre, London.

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 series, she continued her Hidden Histories project through the operatic stage. This idea was ignited in 1990 with an experimental music/film (she is also a trained film-maker) about the famous 18th century, violinist of Caribbean heritage,  George Polgreen Bridgtower, for whom Beethoven had composed the famous Kreutzer Sonata, but about whom little is represented in historical narratives.

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 Caribbean and African) 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 et al 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 garnered multiple awards for her work.