Elena Langer is a prolific composer of colourful, dramatic and often humorous music, familiar to audiences across Europe and America through her operatic, vocal and orchestral pieces. Her 2016 hit for Welsh National Opera, Figaro Gets a Divorce, was described in the Daily Telegraph as “that rare thing: a modern opera that exerts an immediate emotional impact”. Her WNO follow-up, the 2018 vaudeville Rhondda Rips It Up!, was wildly popular with audiences across the UK, The Times describing it as “bursting with irreverent joy”. Her chamber opera, Beauty and Sadness, which premiered in Hong Kong in 2019, was described in the Asian Review of Books as a “modern opera for those who think they don’t like modern opera”.

 

Elena Langer studied at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatoire and at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Her works have also been performed at Zurich Opera, Carnegie Hall, the Grand Theatre Geneva, Opera National du Rhin (Strasbourg), Shakespeare’s Globe, Hong Kong Academy of Arts, the Linbury Theatre at Covent Garden, Tokyo Theatre and Symphony Hall, Boston. 

 

Landscape with Three People, a CD of Elena’s vocal and chamber pieces, was released by Harmonia Mundi in 2016. The Times wrote: “She can do sardonic astringency but also evoke surreal otherworldliness or romantic yearning. It all depends on her chosen texts, to which she responds in meticulous detail”. The title song-cycle Landscape with Three People, a setting of poems by Lee Harwood for soprano, counter-tenor, oboe and baroque ensemble, has been performed at Cratfield, Esslingen and the Oxford Lieder Festival.

 

The orchestral suite created from Figaro Gets a Divorce was premiered by Maxim Emelyanychev with the Seattle Symphony in 2020; Anna Rakitina has conducted it with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, and there have been further performances by Gergely Madaras and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, by Sir Mark Elder with the Hallé Orchestra and Nicholas McGegan with the Cleveland Orchestra. In 2025 the suite will be performed by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra.

 

The oboist Nick Daniel premiered Elena’s Glühwein Concerto with Deutsche Kammerakademie Neuss am Rhein in 2022, and a new song cycle, Love & Endings, for soprano, oboe and harpsichord, was performed by Nick, Anna Dennis and Mahan Esfahani in April 2023 in Aldeburgh.

 

In 2022 the London Philharmonic Orchestra, together with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, asked Elena to write a new large-scale symphonic work. The Dong with a Luminous Nose is a setting of the romantic nonsense poem by Edward Lear, for chorus, orchestra and cello solo. The premiere took place at the Royal Festival Hall in London, conducted by Andrey Boreyko in March 2023, and in March 2024 Sir Mark Elder conducted the American premiere at Symphony Hall in Boston. In November 2024, The Dong with a Luminous Nose will be performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

 

​Elena is currently working on a new orchestral work for the London Philharmonic Orchestra for their 2027/28 season.

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