Nigel Hess

Music director of the Cambridge Footlights while still an undergraduate, Nigel Hess learned dramatic timing early and has never stopped using it. His television themes for Campion, Maigret, Wycliffe and Hetty Wainthropp Investigates outlived the programmes they belonged to and brought him Ivor Novello awards; as house composer to the Royal Shakespeare Company he wrote some twenty scores, and his Broadway music for Much Ado About Nothing and Cyrano de Bergerac took the Drama Desk Award. Ladies in Lavender, his best-known film score, turns on its violin writing, recorded by Joshua Bell with the Royal Philharmonic. His Piano Concerto, commissioned in memory of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, was premiered by Lang Lang, and in 2023 he was among the composers asked for new music for the coronation of Charles III. Born in 1953, he has written for productions at Shakespeare's Globe as well, and his concert catalogue includes A Christmas Overture and music for symphonic wind band. He devised Admission: One Shilling, a piece about the wartime concerts his great-aunt Myra Hess organised.