Howard Goodall
Howard Goodall is one of Britain's most distinguished and versatile composers. Almost everyone knows at least one of his popular TV themes for Blackadder, Mr Bean, Red Dwarf, The Catherine Tate Show, Q.I. or The Vicar of Dibley.
Film scores include the EMMY®-Award winning Into the Storm (2009), BAFTA-nominated The Gathering Storm (2003), Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie, and he has enjoyed great success with his Classic FM album releases.
Biography
Howard Goodall was a chorister, a rock band talent contest winner in the days before Simon Cowell, a music scholar and the musical director of a classic BBC comedy sketch show all before he turned 21. In the following two decades he has become one of Britain’s most popular and versatile composers, writing theme songs for hit TV shows, best selling albums of choral music, a Requiem that is regularly performed at churches and concert halls, and film scores and West End Musicals.
Howard is Classic FM's Composer in Residence and his new album, Pelican in the Wilderness, is released on 10th May, the third of his albums with Classic FM. The first, Enchanted Voices, a setting of the Beatitudes, occupied the No.1 slot of the UK Specialist Classical CD Chart for 23 weeks after its release. It was followed in November 2009 with the release of Enchanted Carols.
Howard hosts his own weekly show on Classic FM, Howard Goodall On..., appears regularly on BBC TV music programmes and has written and presented his own highly-successful TV documentary series on the theory and history of music for Channel 4. For these series he has been honoured by a BAFTA, an RTS Judges' Prize and has also won over a dozen other major international broadcast awards including an Emmy, and last year, a Classical BRIT.
Howard's many musicals, from The Hired Man (1984) to Two Cities (2006) have been performed throughout the English-speaking world, including London's West End and Off-Broadway, and won many international awards, including Ivor Novello and TMA Awards for Best Musical.
He is a prodigious writer of choral music, and “Eternal Light: A Requiem” was originally commissioned as both a choral-orchestral-dance piece and a choral orchestral work. It was premiered by London Musici, the choir of Christ Church Cathedral and the Rambert Dance Company in September 2008. It is now viewed as a contemporary classic and is one of the most performed Requiems in Britain, earning Howard a Classical Brit award for Composer of the Year 2009.
He is a tireless advocate for music education and a passionate believer in young people's inherent musicality, receiving the 2007-8 Sir Charles Grove/Making Music Prize for Outstanding Contribution to British Music, and in January 2007 he was appointed as the UK's first ever National Ambassador for Singing, leading a 4-year programme (Sing Up) to improve the provision of group singing for all primary-age children, which has now reached 85% of all schools.
2010 is already shaping up to be a busy year, with the May release of Pelican in the Wilderness, the launch of new musicals Love Story and The Selfish Giant, programmes with Sky Arts and music for an ITV1 show, 'The Seasons', with Alan Titchmarsh.
Howard Goodall's 'Pelican in the Wilderness' was released on 10th May. Order it from Amazon.
