Brenton Broadstock

Brenton Broadstock was born in Melbourne, Australia. He studied History, Politics and Music at Monash University, and later composition and theory with Donald Freund at Memphis State University in the USA and with Peter Sculthorpe at the University of Sydney. He was awarded a Doctorate of Music by the University of Melbourne in 1987 where since 1982 he had been employed in the Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne.

His works have been performed by all of the major orchestras in Australia — the Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Queensland, Tasmanian and West Australian Symphony Orchestras, and the Australian Youth Orchestra — as well as the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Ulster Orchestra, and other orchestras throughout Europe and Asia.

Broadstock has won numerous prizes for composition, including first prize in the 1981 Townsville Pacific Festival?s National Composition Competition (for the Festive Overture for orchestra); the Albert Maggs Award; two APRA Music Awards (for the orchestral works The Mountain and Toward The Shining Light); and first prize in the Hambacher Preis International Composers’ Competition, West Germany (for the Tuba Concerto). In 1994 he received the Paul Lowin Song Cycle Award, Australia‘s richest composition prize, for Bright Tracks. His orchestral work Stars In A Dark Night (Symphony No.2) received four Sounds Australian National Music Critics’ Awards, including ‘Best Australian Orchestral Work’ of 1989, and was the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s entry to the prestigious Paris Rostrum of Composers in 1990. In 2001 Broadstock received the Australian Music Centre‘s Award for Best Composition (Victoria) for Dark Side (Symphony No.5), and in 2002 his Federation Flourish was nominated as the APRA-AMC ‘Orchestral Work of the Year’.

In 1988-89 he was the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra‘s inaugural Composer-in-Residence, and in 1991 he signed a publishing contract with G. Schirmer (Australia), the first Australian composer to do so. In 1997 he received the Jean Bogan Prize for his solo piano work Dying of the Light and in 1998 he received the Michelle Morrow Memorial Award for Composition and an Explorations Opera Project grant. Also in 1998 he spent three months in Italy on fellowships awarded by the Civitella Ranieri and Rockefeller Foundations.

In 1999 Broadstock received the prestigious Don Banks Award from the Australia Council for his contribution to Australian Music, which enabled him to compose for the year, and to visit the USA (Indiana University), England and Russia.

His music has been performed at many international festivals, and some 40 of his works have been recorded and are now available on commercial CDs worldwide. Notable amongst these is the recording of his five symphonies performed by the Krasnoyarsk Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Wheeler, which was released on the Etcetera label in 2001 to excellent reviews in England and Australia.