Guy Woolfenden

Guy Anthony Woolfenden (Ipswich, 12 July 1937) is an English composer and conductor whose career combines theatre, musical direction and concert music. He was initially trained as a chorister at Westminster Abbey, where he became head chorister, and later studied at the University of Cambridge, where he graduated as Bachelor of Arts in 1959.

After graduating, he studied conducting at the Guildhall School of Music with Norman Del Mar and worked as a professional horn player with the Sadler's Wells Opera company between 1960 and 1961. That same year he joined the music team of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he served as head of music and resident composer from 1963 to 1998. During those years he wrote more than 150 scores for the company, among them incidental music for all of Shakespeare's plays. His musical based on The Comedy of Errors won the Ivor Novello Award and the Society of West End Theatre award for Best New British Musical of that year in 1976.

As a conductor, he worked at Morley College between 1968 and 1978 and was music director of the Liverpool Mozart Orchestra (1970–1992) and of the Warwickshire Symphony Orchestra from 1972. He also collaborated with the London Symphony, the Royal Philharmonic, the CBSO, the Hallé and the Kirov Ballet. In the field of opera he conducted with the Chelsea Opera Group and Scottish Opera, and he conducted the first British productions of Nielsen's Saul og David (1977), Liszt's Don Sanche (1977) and Tchaikovsky's The Maid of Orleans (1978). He was also the first artistic director of the Cambridge Festival, from 1986 to 1991.

His incidental music is notable for evoking the atmosphere of a period without surrendering a personal voice or contemporary idioms, drawing on archaic techniques such as organum and hemiola and on a harmony rooted in the modality of earlier English composers. His concert music, much of which derives from stage scores, is accessible and melodically memorable, and includes an important body of wind band repertoire, of which Gallimaufry (1983) is the best known.

Woolfenden left a notable legacy in British Shakespearean theatre and in the wind band repertoire, where his music continues to be performed frequently in educational and amateur settings.