EMI Classics is pleased to release Howard Goodall’s original soundtrack to the upcoming four-part natural history series on ITV Britain through the Seasons. Goodall’s The Seasons will be released on CD and digitally in October 2009 to dovetail with the ITV broadcasts. Last year year, Goodall, an award-winning composer, acclaimed broadcaster and Classic FM radio Composer-in-Residence was named Classical BRIT Composer of the Year for his best-selling Eternal Light: A Requiem, released by EMI in 2008.
Describing the background to his new composition, Goodall says, “Several composers over the centuries have responded musically to the idea of the changing seasons, most notably Vivaldi. Haydn, Spohr, Verdi, Glazunov and Tchaikovsky, but I believe I am the first composer to create my Seasons suite over the period of a year in the respective seasons themselves. I would like to take credit for this approach, but in all honesty the season-by-season time scale was dictated by the filming schedule of the ITV series Britain through the Seasons, for which the suite provides a soundtrack.”
“Composing Autumn in the Autumn and Spring in the Spring turned out to be more stimulating than I had anticipated,” continues Goodall, “especially as the 12 months from September 2008 to August 2009 have been unusually rich in seasonal difference in the British Isles. … As it has turned out, the resulting suite is all but a cello concerto, since I decided right at the start that a keening and curling, dipping and diving solo cello set against the string ensemble would give me great expressive scope, painting the woody, musty hues of November and the chilly breezes of January with as much ease as it does the languorous warmth and colour of June or July.”
Multi-award-winning British composer Howard Goodall is a versatile radio and television presenter and music educator who writes music that people love to hear and sing. Reviewing Eternal Light: A Requiem, commissioned on behalf of London Musici for performances with the Rambert Dance Company, and released on CD by EMI Classics in September 2008, Classical Music Today suggested ways in which it was likely to be a hit: “in the theatre, in the local church, and on the CD shelves […] Because of its composer’s popularity, because of its singability, because of its immediacy and because of the visuality of a Requiem written to be danced, this may be the right Requiem for our time.”
Goodall has composed themes and incidental music for such popular television series as Mr Bean, Blackadder, The Vicar of Dibley, Red Dwarf, The Catherine Tate Show and Q.I. He has also written and presented six award-winning television series on musical history for Channel 4 (Howard Goodall’s Organworks (1996), Howard Goodall’s Choirworks (1998), Howard Goodall’s Big Bangs (2000), Howard Goodall’s Great Dates (2002), Howard Goodall’s 20th Century Greats (2004) and Howard Goodall’s How Music Works (2006)) and a programme on the making of Handel's Messiah for BBC (2009). He released his last album Howard Goodall’s Enchanted Voices earlier this year on the Classic FM label and currently hosts his own weekly show, Howard Goodall On...
Howard Goodall’s film scores include the BAFTA-nominated The Gathering Storm, Mr Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie, Bernard and the Genie, Blackadder Back & Forth and Mr Bean's Holiday. His score for the new HBO/BBC Films/Ridley Scott/Rainmark film, Into the Storm has earned him an EMMY nomination for this year’s awards.
A prodigious composer of choral music, Goodall has contributed songs to platinum-selling CDs, including In Memoriam Anne Frank and O Lord God of Time and Eternity, sung at the 2003 Service of Remembrance for the Iraq war in St Paul's Cathedral. His settings of Psalm 23 and Love Divine are amongst the most performed of all contemporary choral works.
Goodall’s works for musical theatre include The Hired Man, Girlfriends, Days of Hope, Silas Marner, The Kissing Dance, The Dreaming, A Winter’s Tale and Two Cities, several of them performed throughout the English-speaking world, including London’s West End and Off-Broadway. In 2009, for example, his A Winter’s Tale will be seen around the UK, performed by Youth Music Theatre UK and The Dreaming will be produced by National Youth Music Theatre. In 2010, Love Story will have its professional premiere.
A tireless advocate for music education, Howard Goodall was appointed the UK’s first National Ambassador for Singing in January 2007, at the head of an important four-year, multi-million pound government national singing programme (Sing Up) for all primary-age children.
