Events19 results
About
Joby Talbot is a British composer. He has written for a wide variety of purposes and an accordingly broad range of styles, including instrumental and vocal concert music, film and television scores, pop arrangements and works for dance. He is therefore known to sometimes disparate audiences for quite different works.
Prominent compositions include the a cappella choral works The Wishing Tree (2002) and Path of Miracles (2005); orchestral works Sneaker Wave (2004), Tide Harmonic (2009), Worlds, Stars, Systems, Infinity (2012) and Meniscus (2012); the theme and score for the popular BBC Two comedy series The League of Gentlemen (1999–2002); silent film scores The Lodger (1999) and The Dying Swan (2002) for the British Film Institute; film scores The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), Son of Rambow (2007) and Penelope (2008).
Works for dance include Chroma (2006), Genus (2007), Fool's Paradise (2007), Chamber Symphony (2012), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (2011, revived 2012 and 2013) and The Winter's Tale (2014), the latter two being full-length narrative ballet scores commissioned by The Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada.
Talbot premiered his first opera in January 2015 with Dallas Opera, a one-act work entitled Everest to a libretto by Gene Scheer, which follows the three of the climbers involved in the 1996 Mount Everest disaster.
Background
Talbot was born in August 1971 in Wimbledon, London. He grew up in Mitcham, south London, and attended King's College School, Wimbledon, on a music scholarship from the age of eight. Talbot played the piano and oboe, studied composition privately with Brian Elias and after receiving a Bachelor of Music from Royal Holloway University of London, he completed a Master of Music (Composition) at Guildhall School of Music and Drama under Simon Bainbridge.
Early career and concert works
Though classically trained, Talbot's early career centred on film and television scores and pop arrangements. His work as arranger and keyboardist with Neil Hannon's band The Divine Comedy continued from 1993 until 2002. In 1999, following some minor television scoring jobs, Talbot was commissioned to write the theme and score for BBC Two's comedy series The League of Gentlemen, for which he was awarded the Royal Television Society Award for Best Title Music and which he would continue to score throughout its three series and film, The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse (2005). Talbot was commissioned, also in 1999, by the British Film Institute to provide a new score for Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 silent film The Lodger, and again in 2002 the BFI had Talbot write a piano trio to accompany Evgenii Bauer's The Dying Swan (1917).
Concert works of this period include Luminescence (1997) for the BBC Philharmonic; Falling (1998), written for cellist Phillip Sheppard; Incandescence (1998) for percussion and orchestra, commissioned by the Brunel Ensemble and later toured by Evelyn Glennie and the London Sinfonietta; String Quartet No. 1 (1999) and No. 2 (2002), for the Duke Quartet; the saxophone quartet Blue Cell (2001) for the Apollo Saxophone Quartet; and Minus 1500 (2001) for bassoon, percussion, strings and piano, commissioned by the London Sinfonietta. During this time, Talbot also completed a popular reworking of Portishead's 'All Mine' for The Divine Comedy's contribution to Tom Jones' covers album Reload (1999).
In 2002, Talbot wrote The Wishing Tree, a short a cappella madrigal setting a text by Kathleen Jamie, for The King's Singers, commissioned by the ensemble and The Proms as part of the Queen's Golden Jubilee. Subsequent to this, Talbot was asked by Nigel Short, artistic director of chamber choir Tenebrae, to create a work that described the ancient Christian pilgrimage route across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela. The resultant piece was the hour-long, a cappella journey Path of Miracles, setting multilingual texts collated by Robert Dickinson, which has steadily gained popularity with vocal ensembles and audiences.
Sneaker Wave (2004) for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales was Talbot's second Proms commission, and also in that year, he was appointed Classic FM's inaugural Composer-in-Residence, a project which involved the composition of one short piece for small ensemble per month and resulted in the album Once Around the Sun (2005 Sony BMG). In 2006, Talbot wrote the trumpet concerto Desolation Wilderness for soloist Alison Balsom and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Turku Philharmonic Orchestras. A third work for the Proms was Talbot's 2011 arrangement of Purcell's Chacony in G Minor for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The next year, Talbot was commissioned by the Philharmonia Orchestra to write an eighth movement to Holst's The Planets, as part of their interactive installation Universe of Sound at the Science Museum, London. The work, entitled Worlds, Stars, Systems, Infinity premiered at The Royal Festival Hall, London, in 2012, as part of the 2012 London Cultural Olympiad.