Joby Talbot

Over the course of his career, composer Joby Talbot, born August 25, 1971 in Wimbledon, England, has applied his skills over a diverse series of styles. A child prodigy who attended college on a music scholarship before the age of ten, Talbot would eventually earn a Master of Music (Composition). In addition to his frequent collaborations with the band The Divine Comedy, he established himself as a serious composer in the 1990s with pieces such as 1997’s “Luminescence,” and “Falling”, a 1998 collaboration with Phillip Sheppard. He followed his award-winning theme for the 1999 television comedy The League of Gentlemen with a new score for the Alfred Hitchcock silent-era classic The Lodger. He continued to produce work for the BBC including 2002’s The Wishing Tree and 2004’s Sneaker Wave.

The full range of Talbot’s talents were on display in 2005 a year in which he worked with Paul McCartney on the former Beatle’s solo album Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, and recorded an album of instrumental covers of songs originally written and performed by the rock band The White Stripes. That same year he debuted his choral piece, Path of Miracles, and he scored film director Garth Jennings’s movie adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He provided music for The Royal Ballet’s production of Chroma, his first collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor. The next decade found Talbot collaborating with choreography Christopher Wheeldon on a pair of ballets adapted from literary works, Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland and The Winter’s Tale. Talbot’s first opera, Everest, opened to enthusiastic reviews in 2015. In 2016 Talbot reteamed with Garth Jennings on the hit animated movie Sing. Ink Dark Moon, a classical piece written for guitarist Miloš Karadaglić debuted in 2018, as did Talbot’s new score for the classic 1932 horror film Vampyr.