The Creative Team

Will Todd, composer, and Ben Dunwell, librettist, the creators of Among Angels, met at Bristol University and began their collaboration at that time.

Will Todd was born in Durham in 1970. He received an Honours degree in Music from the University of Bristol in 1991 and an MMUS in 1993. Born in Buckinghamshire in 1969, Ben Dunwell received an English Degree from Bristol University in 1990.

In 1990 Will and Ben worked on their first collaboration, the musical Table for Two, set in the world of restaurant politics. Their collaboration has produced a major work almost every year since then, including two cantatas, Midwinter and The Burning Road; an oratorio, St Cuthbert; an opera, Isambard Kingdom Brunel; and various ballads and songs, including the ghostly Ballad of Will Jobling.

Ben and Will have also written two musicals for children, Who wants the World, and Daniel and the Pride of Kings, and a children's pageant Tales from the End of Northworld. Performances of all these works have taken place across Britain. Venues where they have been performed include the Cathedrals of Durham and St Albans, and performances around London. Recordings have been made of Midwinter (Brunel Ensemble 1994), The Burning Road (Crouch End Festival Chorus, 1996) and St Cuthbert (Halle Orchestra and Chorus 2001). In 2001 Will and Ben's opera The Blackened Man was runner-up in the International Guiseppe Verdi competition for the Composition of a Lyric Opera held in Milan. In 1995, Will and Ben also set up Tyalgum Press, a publishing production arm for their work. See their website on: www.tyalgumpress.com

Will and Ben are currently writing a new musical stage-work based on Thomas Hardy's novel The Woodlanders which is being given workshops by the National Opera Studio. They are also at work on a commission from the acclaimed Streetwise Opera company for production at The Sage, Gateshead in October 2006.

Apart from his work with Ben, Will Todd has also collaborated on the music theatre piece, The Screams of Kitty Genovese, with David Simpatico. It was workshopped by the Public Theater, New York, director John Caird, and also by English National Opera and the O'Neill Music Theater Conference. It was produced at the Boston Conservatory. Will's extensive compositional output also includes three concertos: - Saxophone (1992), Violin (1996) and Trumpet (2000) - Mass in Blue, a setting of the Latin Mass for Jazz orchestra, choir and Soprano and many smaller choral works, works for In 1992, Ben took his one-man play Tomis - a multi-media meditation on the life and exile of the poet, Ovid - to the Canadian Fringe Festivals of Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Edmonton. The cantata Hell's Angels, a Crouch End Festival Choir commission, was written with composer Paul Patterson and premiered at the Barbican Centre, London, in 1998. The piece synthesises Milton's Paradise Lost with new text and Biblical quotations to follow the fall of Satan's angels into a wild biker-gang running across the deserts of California. It was recorded by David Temple and the Crouch End Festival Chorus in 2001.

Read also Angels in Salzburg about the world premiere of Among Angels.