World Premiere: June 17, 2021
Last HSO Performance: HSO Premiere
Instrumentation: 2 flutes with 2nd doubling piccolo, oboe, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, trombone, bass trombone, timpani, percussion, harp and strings, solo trombone
Duration: 20 minutes 

Born in 1993 in Hong Kong.

Dani Howard was born in 1993 and raised in Hong Kong, where her father was an English police officer monitoring the handover of the British colony to the Chinese. She was introduced to music by her mother, an amateur clarinetist, in a rather unconventional way — by purchasing a drum set for her when Dani was five. (“I wanted to hit things,” she later admitted.) She soon started piano lessons but did not really get excited about music until beginning cello lessons at age ten with Richard Bamping, Principal Cellist of the Hong Kong Philharmonic (for whom she was to write a concerto in 2026). She became proficient enough as a teenager to play cello works by Brahms and Britten, but her main interest during those years was composition, which she was encouraged to pursue by her piano teacher. “I knew I had something to say,” Howard recalled, “but I didn’t really like performing.” 

Howard showed enough musical promise to receive a scholarship for study at London’s Royal College of Music, where she received her first formal training in composition from Jonathan Cole. She blossomed under Cole’s guidance and was particularly gratified that the students enjoyed playing her music, so she submitted scores to the International Antonín Dvořák Composition Competition in Prague during her last two years at the RCM, and won prizes both years. Howard graduated in 2015 with First Class Honours and a commission for a work titled Arches from London’s semi-professional Orchestra Vitae, and then used most of the fee to record the piece to have as an audible calling-call for her own promotion. That recording helped her win an open competition for a commissioned piece for the 25th anniversary concert of U.K. radio station Classic FM. Howard rose quickly to prominence among British composers after that work — Argentum — was successfully premiered in 2017 by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and followed in 2019 by Gates of Spring with London Symphony Orchestra and Coalescence with Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Coalescence made such an impression in Liverpool that the RLPO immediately commissioned her to write the Trombone Concerto, which won the 2022 Royal Philharmonic Society Award, a nomination for the South Bank Sky Arts Awards, and was chosen as the featured work on the first commercial recording, on the Rubicon label, entirely of her orchestral compositions.

Howard has since received performances and commissions from leading British, European and Asian ensembles, conductors and soloists, served as Composer-in-Residence with London Chamber Orchestra in 2022-2023, was appointed Resident Artist with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain in 2024, and named “Celebrated Composer” of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra for the 2024-2025 season, which included performances of fifteen of her works and the U.K. premiere of her Saxophone Concerto by Jess Gillam, co-commissioned by the orchestra. One unusual commission came to her in 2020 from the Casa Batlló in Barcelona, for which she composed a sixty-minute score for their new audio-guide inspired by various spaces within Antoni Gaudí’s iconic building; it was recorded by members of the Berlin Philharmonic, Berlin Radio Symphony, and Deutsche Oper Berlin.

When the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic commissioned a new work from Howard following the success of her Coalescence in 2019, they did so without specifying what it should be. Given that freedom, she recalled a recent conversation with Peter Moore, Principal Trombone of the London Symphony Orchestra, whom she had met during her study at the RCM, about the possibility of writing a concerto for him. In the liner notes for the recording that Moore, the RLPO and conductor Michael Seal released in 2024 on the Rubicon label, Timmy Fisher, LSO program annotator and BBC Proms program editor, wrote, “When Dani Howard first mooted the idea of a concerto to Peter Moore, LSO Principal Trombone, Covid-19 was yet to strike. By the time she began writing the piece, in the summer of 2020, concert halls were silent and many of Howard’s musician colleagues had doggedly set up shop online. Meanwhile, the everyday heroics of bus drivers, refuse workers and community organizers were finally getting the recognition they deserved. Howard’s Trombone Concerto is a celebration of these people, and their resolve during the pandemic provides its emotional arc. 

“In the first movement, the humming rhythms of day-to-day life (embodied in the solo trombone’s instruction to ‘play as if you are totally oblivious to your surroundings’) are displaced by a gradual Realisation [sic] — a way to contribute, perhaps, or a sense of one’s own worth. This seed of an idea is turned over and over in the second movement, Rumination. Here, over a repeating harmonic cycle, the initially unaccompanied trombone is joined in stages by sections of the orchestra, its confidence growing with every new exchange. Then comes the ecstatic finale, an Illumination in which the soloist’s resolve is borne out in a burst of fireworks.”

©2026 Dr. Richard E. Rodda