Elena Langer

Elena Langer was born in Moscow in 1974. She studied at the Gnessin college and then composition at the Moscow Conservatory before moving to London in 1999, where she continued her studies at the Royal College of Music with Julian Anderson and at the Royal Academy of Music, working with Simon Bainbridge. Opera and music theatre have been at the centre of her work from early on. In 2002 she became the first Jerwood Composer in Association at the Almeida Theatre in London, for which she wrote the short operas Ariadne and The Girl of Sand to texts by the poet Glyn Maxwell, and the two later collaborated on The Lion’s Face. Four Sisters, a one-act comedy, was written for Bard College in New York in 2012. For Welsh National Opera she composed Figaro Gets a Divorce (2016), to a libretto by David Pountney, and the suffragette comedy Rhondda Rips It Up!. Her music has also been heard at the Royal Opera House, Zurich Opera and Carnegie Hall.