Compositions
Her first professional score was commissioned by David Puttnam, and was the soundtrack for the 1982 film Experience Preferred... But Not Essential. Later, she started to compose music for BBC and Channel 4 shows and movies, such as Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Four Days in July by Mike Leigh and The Storyteller by Jim Henson.
Since 1992 Rachel Portman has been in demand for Hollywood productions, and remains one of the few female composers to have achieved significant success at this level. In an interview, discussing the influence of her success to inspire women composers, she states: "I really haven’t ever thought of myself as a female composer, but rather as a composer. It never occurred to me I was one of the only women composers in film when I started out. There is still a huge imbalance in the industry when there are many, many greatly talented women composers of film music around now. I hope it becomes more and more the norm to see women credited as composers in film and TV in the future."
Portman has also written several concert and stage commissions including a musical of Little House on the Prairie. In 2003 her opera The Little Prince premiered at the Houston Grand Opera and has since been performed throughout the United States and recorded under the auspices of the BBC. Based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's novel of the same name, Portman's The Little Prince is one of relatively few operas intended for both children and adults. Characterized by cleanly etched vocal lines for boy soprano and lively children's choruses, the opera represents the composer's most ambitious work. She also premiered The Water Diviner's Tale (2007), a choral symphony inspired in climate change for the BBC Proms, and later, Endangered (2012), an orchestral piece commissioned by the National Centre for the Performing Arts (China) in Beijing for a concert on the occasion of the World Environment Day in 2013.
In 2019, Portman wrote Earth Song for the BBC Singers, with text by the poet Nick Drake and Greta Thunberg. She composed the soundtrack for the BBC1 Christmas special Mimi and the Mountain Dragon in 2019.
Between 2020 and 2025, Rachel Portman has continued to expand her musical repertoire across a variety of mediums, including film, television, stage, and concert compositions. In 2020, she released Ask the River (Node Records), a solo piano album, and scored Disney's Godmothered, directed by Sharon Maguire. The following year, her work featured in several notable projects: she contributed to Incidental: Music For The Stage, a charity album including a piece based on Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities; composed the score for the documentary Julia about Julia Child; and provided music for the United Nations Development Programme short film Don’t Choose Extinction. She also began a series of collaborations with Chevrolet, composing music for the advertisement Holiday Ride.
Portman’s output in subsequent years highlighted her versatility and ongoing interest in thematic and socially conscious work. In 2022, she composed The First Morning of the World for Joyce DiDonato’s album Eden, and returned to Chevrolet with Mrs. Hayes. 2023 saw the release of Beyond the Screen – Film Works on Piano (Sony Classical), and Tipping Points, a concerto for violin, orchestra, and voice featuring poems by Nick Drake performed by Niklas Liepe with WDR Funkhausorchester. She also scored another Chevrolet campaign, A Holiday to Remember. In 2024, she contributed There Will Be A Place for soprano Lucy Crowe, scored Hulu’s TV series We Were The Lucky Ones, and composed for the film The Return by Uberto Pasolini. That year also included a Christmas arrangement of Silent Night, performed at the Royal Albert Hall.
In 2025, Portman debuted several new compositions at major European festivals, including Dolomites for the Südtirol Festival Merano, Filmscapes for Flute and Orchestra for the Emilia-Romagna Festival, and The Gathering Tree for the Proms. She also expanded her collaboration with Joyce DiDonato in Another Eve, an extended version of her earlier piece. Her ongoing exploration of vocal and instrumental forms continued with singles such as Hannah's Song, Eventide, Moment In Time, and June. Kings College, Cambridge commissioned her to compose a carol for the 2025 Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols; she chose "The Darkling Thrush" by Thomas Hardy as the text.
