Murray Gold

Hailed as the U.K.’s answer to Bear McCreary, Murray Gold stands among the most accomplished television composers of the past decade. Born in Portsmouth in 1969, he began piano lessons at six and later arranged pieces for high-school brass ensembles during his teenage years. Following a History degree at Cambridge University, he contributed to a theater production at the Edinburgh Festival, then wrote scripts for Channel 5; his breakthrough came with the original score for the BBC-TV adaptation of Vanity Fair. A frequent collaborator of writer Russell T. Davies, he supplied the music for both Queer as Folk and Casanova. In 2005 he was appointed musical director for the relaunched Doctor Who, for which he devised a fresh arrangement of the program’s celebrated theme. Five compilation albums drawn from the series have since appeared, incorporating soprano Melanie Pappenheim and the Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon; these releases rank as the highest-selling television soundtracks in the U.K. At the 2010 Proms he conducted, and he also prepared and orchestrated two live Doctor Who concerts presented at Cardiff’s Millennium Centre and London’s Royal Albert Hall. Additional film scores include Death at a Funeral and Alien Autopsy, while his television work extends to the Doctor Who spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures.