David Sawer has received commissions from the BBC Proms, English National Opera, Royal Danish Opera, Opera North, Garsington Opera, Bregenz Festival, Cheltenham Festival, BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Ensemble Musikfabrik.
Major orchestral works include: Byrnan Wood, the greatest happiness principle, Flesh and Blood; the ballets Cat’s-Eye, for Ballet Rambert, and April \ March, for The Royal Ballet; and Rumpelstiltskin which BCMG toured to Huddersfield and Spitalfields Festivals, and subsequently released as a feature film for Curzon Cinemas & Sky Arts.
Drama, or a fascination with theatrical possibilities, is present in many of his works, and he has written a number of scores for the theatre and for radio. Operas include: From Morning to Midnight, premiered by English National Opera at the London Coliseum, for which received an Olivier Award nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Opera; Skin Deep with librettist Armando Iannucci; and The Skating Rink, which premiered at Garsington Opera to critical acclaim.
Sawer studied at the University of York and in Cologne with Mauricio Kagel; he has been awarded the Fulbright-Chester-Schirmer Fellowship in Composition, a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award and the Arts Foundation’s Composer Fellowship.
He is published by Universal Edition and Edition Peters.