SWAIN, Freda

Freda Swain was a British composer, pianist and music educator.Swain wrote some 450 pieces, piano and chamber music as well as many songs, but also opera and orchestral works, including two piano concertos and a clarinet concertino intended for Frederick Thurston. Few were performed aside from a series featured in the NEMO Series of concerts that Swain herself founded after the war.

Her first major success was The Harp of Aengus for violin and orchestra (after the Yeats poem), with soloist Achille Rivarde at Queen's Hall in January 1925. The solo Violin Sonata was premiered by May Harrison at Wigmore Hall on 8 December 1933.Her "Airmail" Piano Concerto, mailed in instalments to her husband Arthur Alexander while he was stuck in South Africa during World War II, was performed by Alexander in Cape Town.[She composed a one-act opera Second Chance, but left two other operas incomplete.