Born in Belfast, Eduard Zatriqi earned a BMus with first class honours (2009), and an MA and PhD in Music Composition (2010 and 2015, respectively) from Queen's University Belfast. His two chamber operas, Van Helsing: The Opera Exclamation Mark (2009) and The Monster in the Dark (2012), received their Belfast premieres by Spark Opera. He was selected as a winner of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival Composition Competition in 2011 for his Piano Trio. Eduard also won the inaugural 2016 Peter Rosser Award for his composition War Games, which received a subsequent performance by Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble live on BBC Radio Three in September 2017. In 2018, he won the Hibernian Orchestra Composition Competition for his orchestral work Human Machine and was also awarded a commission by HRSE to write a new composition (Balkan Spectres), with funding provided by the PRS foundation. As part of the project Towards a New Symphonic Tradition, New Horizons Music commissioned Eduard (with funding from ACNI Lottery Project) to compose his most recent work Pierrot's Splendiferous Symphonic Dances. Eduard's compositional interests and influences encompass the exploration of various parametric and systematic approaches (Boulez and Ligeti), the application of the overtone series as a harmonic language (Grisey and Saariaho) and the exploitation of sounds produced by unorthodox playing techniques (Lachenmann and Sciarrino). Moreover, given his Kosovar heritage, Eduard frequently integrates particular rhythmic, harmonic and gestural aspects of traditional Balkan music into his compositions. In addition to composing, Eduard's other interests include playing jazz piano and learning the Albanian and Croatian languages.
