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Diana Burrell was born in Norwich in 1948. She studied at Cambridge University and now lives in Harwich, Essex. After spending several years as a teacher, she became a free-lance viola player, but gradually concentrated her energies on writing music. Her first piece to receive widespread critical acclaim was the Missa Sancte Endeliente, a 50-minute work written for the 1980 St Endellion Festival. A massive composition for five soloists, semi-chorus, chorus and orchestra, the Missa incorporates settings of Cornish and Latin texts as well as a wide range of compositional techniques from micro tonality to modality. Brought to London for the Spitalfields Festival of 1983, the Missa provided the launching pad for an ongoing series of evermore illustrious commissions and an impressively wide-ranging, adventurous and distinguished body of work.

Burrell’s first major orchestral piece, simply entitled Landscape (1988) has been described as depicting both a wild windswept countryside and a tough urban vista. The use of instruments in their extreme registers is a hallmark of the diversity of orchestral palette the composer puts at her disposal in all her works. Landscape is one of the recent ‘Encore’ winners (an award organised by the Royal Philharmonic Society and BBC Radio 3 and sponsored by the PRS Foundation).

Diana Burrell’s body of work covers the spectrum of compositional achievement from the String Quartet (Gulls and Angels of 1993) to chamber ensemble pieces such as the vividly ritualistic dreamscape Barrow (1991), opera (The Albatross, written in 1987 and premiered to great critical acclaim by Trinity College of Music in June 1997) and of course her dramatic and colourful Symphonies of Flocks, Herds and Shoals (1995-6) which was a commission from the BBC and was premiered in 1997 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. She has also written many works for young and amateur performers with both respect and imagination, never lowering her compositional sights or blunting the edge of her style.

Recent works include Gold - a Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival commission for Philip Mead and the Royal Northern College of Music Brass Ensemble, Pieces Numbers 80, 81 and 82 for various small ensembles which were commissioned by Queen's College, Cambridge for 'Vigani's Cabinet', and a setting of poems by Emily Dickenson for choir and orchestra entitled And so the Night became... which was premiered in May 2005 by the Bach Choir and the Philharmonia Orchestra in the Royal Festival Hall. 2007 saw the composition of two unusual chamber pieces. One Man Band for solo accordion doubling piano and percussion was written for Mark Knoop and first performed by him at 'Rational Rec', a series of contemporary music events that took place in the Bethnal Green Working Man's Club, and Paragraph for soprano, violin and electronics was commissioned by the BBC and given its first performance by Loré Lixenberg and David Alberman at the Spitalfields Festival. David and Loré also gave the first performance of Concerto for Violin with Singer and 3 Ensembles at Spitalfields in 2009 conducted by Gregory Rose with the Trinity College of Music Contemporary Music Group. This work was shortlisted for an RPS Award.

Among other things, Diana is currently working on The Hours, a major new set of pieces for the organ with various ensembles which is structured around the ancient liturgical 'Hours' of the Church, and is due to be completed in Autumn 2011.

Fresh and vital, her music is uncompromising in its integrity whilst communicating directly to the listener. She has written of her need for ‘strong, rough-edged things, brave disrespectful shapes and sounds...’, as much a reference to her love of modern architecture as a declaration of her compositional creed. She has succeeded in creating a unique, personal language which is both primeval and unequivocally of our time.