She has composed more than one hundred scores for film, television and theatre, and has collaborated with the BBC on several projects, including an opera based on The Little Prince and a choral symphony called The Water Diviner.
Her acute career choices complement her compositional gifts, and she has carved out a unique niche as a composer of human-size stories, an increasing rarity in the box office-dominated film world of the 2000s and 2010s.
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.
[5] 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.
Characterized by cleanly etched vocal lines for boy soprano and lively children's choruses, the opera represents the composer's most ambitious work.
[5] She also premiered The Water Diviner's Tale (2007), a choral symphony inspired in climate change for the BBC Proms,[7] 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.
Other recent works include Tipping Points, a violin concerto performed by Niklas Leipe with WDR Orchestra Germany.
Her film scores embrace a variety of styles, although she is best known for composing clear, string-dominated textures, often shaded with lyrical woodwind lines.
Although Portman gained renown as a composer for romantic comedies, her versatility is reflected in the many genres she has explored, which range from serious drama to psychological thriller, such as The Cider House Rules, for which she also received an Academy Award nomination in 2000.
In 2015, Portman received the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Composition for a Miniseries, Movie, or a Special for her work on Bessie.
Portman collaborated with Lasse Hallstörm on The Cider House Rules (1999) and Chocolat (2000), for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score.
[15] Portman also states that "the purpose of a film score is to illuminate the story", and for this reason she consciously uses the timbrical palette in her orchestrations: "‘Instruments have colour.
[14] Rachel Portman's compositions include[16][5] the soundtracks of The Manchurian Candidate (Jonathan Demme), Oliver Twist (Roman Polanski), Hart's War (Gregory Hoblit), The Legend of Bagger Vance (Robert Redford), Beloved (Jonathan Demme), Benny and Joon (Jeremiah Chechik), Life Is Sweet (Mike Leigh), Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek), Grey Gardens (Michael Sucsy), The Duchess (Saul Dibb), One Day (Lone Scherfig), The Vow (Michael Sucsy), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (Wayne Wang), The Lake House (Alejandro Agresti), Infamous (Douglas McGrath), Mona Lisa Smile (Mike Newell), and The Human Stain (Robert Benton).
Portman was commissioned to write a piece of choral music for the BBC Proms series in August 2007 called The Water Diviner's Tale.