Composers

Joby Talbot’s compositional aesthetic threads through his classical and concert works; scores for film and television; and collaborations with major contemporary choreographers, as well as with internationally acclaimed pop musicians.

Talbot has composed widely for major orchestras, soloists and vocal groups. He has collaborated twice with British chamber choir Tenebrae, for whom he wrote Path of Miracles and employed in his electro-acoustic dance score for choreographer Wayne McGregor's Genus. Further choral commissions include Ave Verum Corpus for the Norfolk and Norwich Festival and the madrigal The Wishing Tree for BBC Proms, performed by The King's Singers. The instrumental Sneaker Wave was also commissioned by the BBC Proms for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Other works for large ensembles have included the trumpet concerto Desolation Wilderness for Alison Balsom and the RLPO; Tide Harmonic, a collaboration with choreographer Carolyn Carlson and the Orchestre National de Lille, soon to be released on Signum Classics; and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Talbot's score to the full-length 2011 ballet by Christopher Wheeldon, a co-commission between The Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada. In 2004 he was appointed Classic FM's inaugural Composer-in-Residence.

Talbot's music has appealed to some of Europe's leading choreographers, including Royal Ballet resident choreographer Wayne McGregor, with whom he has collaborated on Genus (co-written with LA musician Deru) for the Paris Opera Ballet; Entity for Random Dance; and on Chroma for the Royal Ballet. This latter work is choreographed to Talbot's arrangements of songs by The White Stripes from the album Aluminium, conceived by XL Recordings founder Richard Russell. Talbot had previously collaborated with Christopher Wheeldon and Morphoses on Fool's Paradise, choreographed to his work The Dying Swan.

In his work for film and television, Talbot graduated from scoring silent films such as Hitchcock's The Lodger for the BFI, to writing the themes and scores for British comedy series The League of Gentlemen and Psychoville, as well as scoring feature films The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Son of Rambow, Penelope, Franklyn, Burke and Hare and Is Anybody There?

In 2011 Talbot will begin a number of projects across concert and screen platforms, including a work based on the Purcell Chaconne, commissioned by the BBC for their 2011 Proms season and to be performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra.Following the success of his first major orchestral work Luminescence, premiered by the BBC Philharmonic, Joby Talbot has gone on to receive numerous commissions from organisations such as the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta and the BBC Proms. Unrestricted by genre, Talbot has a high profile as a film and TV composer. Screen credits include cult television comedy series ‘The League of Gentlemen’, two silent films for the British Film Institute – Hitchcock’s ‘The Lodger’ and Evgeny Bauer’s ‘The Dying Swan’ – and ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ and ‘Son of Rambow’ with director Garth Jennings.