(2020 commission)
Tom Coult is a composer born in London in 1988. His playful and seductive music has been championed by many of the UK’s major orchestras and ensembles, resulting in a series of acclaimed large-scale pieces including Beautiful Caged Thing for soprano Claire Booth and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Sonnet Machine for the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, and St John’s Dance (premiered by Edward Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra to open the First Night of the 2017 BBC Proms).
He has enjoyed ongoing associations with ensembles such as Britten Sinfonia and London Sinfonietta (who premiered Spirit of the Staircase, nominated for a South Bank Sky Arts Award), and in 2020 will again work with BBC Philharmonic Orchestra with the premiere of a new violin concerto for Daniel Pioro. Also premiering in 2020 is Violet, a new chamber opera for the Aldeburgh Festival, Music Theatre Wales and Theater Magdeburg, touring to venues including the Royal Opera House Linbury Theatre.
His music has been described as ‘funny and surreal and delicately poetic, all at once’ (The Telegraph), and ‘full of bewitching sounds…fresh and precisely imagined’ (The Guardian) – ‘Coult is a composer who spins glittering, teasingly ambiguous patterns out of simple-seeming material…a very individual voice’ (The Telegraph).
Further orchestral performances have come from Netherlands Radio Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic Orchestras and Orchestra of the Swan, while his chamber works have earned performances by ensembles including Arditti Quartet, Psappha, Quatuor Diotima, Fidelio Trio, Riot Ensemble and soloists from the Philharmonia.
Tom studied at the University of Manchester with Camden Reeves and Philip Grange and at King’s College London with George Benjamin. He was 2017-19 Visiting Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts at Trinity College Cambridge and has taught on the Britten Sinfonia Academy composition course and with Aldeburgh Young Musicians.