Critics’ Circle Award

I have been awarded the Critics’ Circle Award for Young Composer for 2022. Their citation read:

Tom Coult is a storyteller in sound with an ear that makes good on the promise of his titles: I Find Planets, for example, Beautiful Caged Thing and Inventions (for Heath Robinson). All the same, his 2018 String Quartet shows that he doesn’t need an off-the-wall title or idea to renew tradition and tonality with a fiercely individual imagination. He writes for instruments and voices rather than against them, he writes in musical but unpredictable forms such as nocturnes and mazes, and he writes music that can’t help sounding like now.

His 2022 opera Violet was described as “the best new British opera in years” by The Daily Telegraph and has already earned further stagings in Germany and France. Also premiered last year, his Horn Trio achieved the feat of sounding familiar, Romantic and entirely original all at once. His tenure as the BBC Philharmonic’s Composer in Residence is enriching the modern orchestral repertoire with a string of pieces including a violin concerto, Pleasure Garden, which has also attracted new performers and audiences.

During 2022, my opera Violet was premiered at Aldeburgh Festival toured the UK (and was staged in Germany in a second production), my horn trio Two Nocturnes and a Maze was premiered at Musikdorf Ernen where I was composer-in-residence, Pleasure Garden received its London premiere with Daniel Pioro and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and my music was released on discs by Psappha and Fenella Humphreys.

The other awards went to Thomas Kelly (Young Pianist), horn player Ben Goldscheider (Young Instrumentalist) and bass-baritone Ossian Huskinson (Young Singer). Opera North’s production Orpheus won the Outstanding Achievement in Opera.

You can read more about the awards and awardees at the Critics’ Circle website.