Guy Woolfenden

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Guy Woolfenden (born July 12, 1937) is an English composer. He was born in Ipswich and attended Whitgift School in Croydon. He studied music at Christ's College in Cambridge and attended graduate school at the Guildhall School of Music. Woolfenden also founded a publishing company, Ariel Music. As leader of the Royal Shakespeare Company and director of the Cambridge Festival, Woolfenden has composed many other pieces for wind bands, chamber ensembles and solo works.

His credits include three productions with Scottish Opera and, in London, the first British productions of Nielsen's Saul and David, Tchaikovsky's Maid of Orleans and Liszt's Don Sanche.

In collaboration with choreographer André Prokovsky, he has arranged the music for four full-length ballets, which he has subsequently conducted in productions with Australian Ballet, Royal Ballet of Flanders, Hong Kong Ballet Company, Scottish Ballet and Asami Maki Ballet, Tokyo. He conducted the acclaimed Russian premiere of Anna Karenina with The Kirov Ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in 1993.

With around 150 scores for the Royal Shakespeare Company and an impressive list of credits with major European theatre companies, including the Comédie-Française, Paris, the Burgtheater, Vienna, the Teatro di Stabile, Genoa and the Norwegian National Theatre, Oslo, Guy Woolfenden's theatre music is highly regarded throughout the world. He has collaborated with some of the world's finest directors, designers and choreographers in many award-winning productions.