Described by The Observer [July 2018] as the “unchallenged sovereign of the Ondes Martenot”, Cynthia Millar’s most performed work, Messiaen’s large-scale Turangalîla Symphonie, made a spectacular post-pandemic return with some of the top orchestras around the world during the 2022-23 season. Cynthia performed with the Berlin Philharmonic, Orchestre National de France, New York Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Brussels Philharmonic, and London Symphony Orchestra, among others. This season also saw Cynthia return to the LA Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony to perform Messiaen’s Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas.

In 2016 Cynthia premiered the Ondes Martenot part specially written for her by Thomas Adès in his opera The Exterminating Angel at the Salzburg Festival, and subsequently at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Danish Opera in March 2018. The 2016-17 season also saw her take part in a ten-concert tour of the Turangalîla Symphonie with the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra and Gustavo Dudamel, beginning in Caracas and culminating in a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall, New York.

Cynthia Millar studied the Ondes Martenot with John Morton in England and Jeanne Loriod in France. Since her first performance of the Turangalîla Symphonie at the 1986 BBC Proms with the National Youth Orchestra under Sir Mark Elder, she has played this piece around 200 times with some of the world’s leading conductors including Simon Rattle, Sakari Oramo, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Franz Welser-Möst, Paavo Järvi, Susanna Mälkki, Andrew Davis and Mariss Jansons.

Cynthia has recorded Turangalîla with the Bergen Symphony Orchestra for Juanjo Mena; and the Trois petites liturgies with the Seattle Symphony for Ludovic Morlot and the London Sinfonietta for Terry Edwards. She has played in well over 100 film and television scores and has written music for film, television and theatre, including scores for Robert Wise, Arthur Penn, Martha Coolidge and Peter Yates.