Elena Langer

Elena Langer (born Moscow, 8 December 1974) is a Russian-born British composer of operas and other contemporary classical music. Her work has been performed at the Royal Opera House, Zurich Opera, Carnegie Hall, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theatre. She studied piano and composition at the Gnessin School in Moscow and composition at the Moscow Conservatoire; in 1999 she moved to London and studied composition at the Royal College of Music (1999–2000) with Julian Anderson and the Royal Academy of Music (2001–03) with Simon Bainbridge.

In 2002 Langer became the first Jerwood Composer in Association at the Almeida Theatre in London, writing the short operas Ariadne (premiered at the Almeida Opera Festival in 2002) and The Girl of Sand (2003), both settings of librettos by poet Glyn Maxwell. Ariadne was further performed at the Tanglewood Festival and the Britten and Strauss Festival in Aldeburgh in 2009, as well as at the Moscow Conservatoire.

In 2009 her song cycle Songs at the Well, based on Russian folk texts, was performed at the Carnegie Hall, New York.

Her next collaboration with Maxwell, a short dramatic piece called The Present, won the Audience Prize at the Zurich Opera House's New Opera Festival in January 2009. The work concerned the case of a patient suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. Langer and Maxwell went on to develop this into the opera The Lion's Face, which enjoyed a successful tour around England and Wales (including 4 performances at the Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden) in a production by John Fulljames for The Opera Group. This work also initiated an ongoing collaboration between The Opera Group and the Institute of Psychiatry, and involved Professor Simon Lovestone, director of the Institute's Biomedical Research Centre, in a consultant role.

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