Behind the Scenes with Daryl Griffith, recording Life On Earth (KPM 759/760)


In 1998 Daryl began composing orchestral music for production companies, including KPM Music. His extensive orchestration credits include scores for Nick Hooper’s films Messiah III, The Future Is Wild, The Girls of Chernobyl and The Young Visiters (which won the Bafta for best music). His production music compositions have been extremely successful and have been licensed worldwide to programmes and commercials, including Sex and the City (HBO), Love Child (ITV), Chuck (NBC) and Häagen-Dazs. He has also performed many of his compositions on BBC Radios Two and Three with the London Salon Ensemble and the BBC Concert Orchestra, including Orient Express, Aladdin and A Simple Life.

Daryl’s film scores include Sacred Journey (2001) and In Search of an Impotent Man (2002), as well as numerous shorts that have been screened worldwide. He has composed and arranged classical crossover and pop albums for artists including Summer Watson, Finbar Furey, Dominic Miller, Chage & Aska, as well as on the Myleene Klass album Moving On, which reached number two in the charts and was subsequently nominated for a Brit award. Daryl also provided arrangements for the Italian pop sensation Cesare Cremonini and for commercials by MasterCard, Citroën and Virgin Trains, and he composed all the orchestrations for the rebranding of the Sky News channel. Daryl has worked as orchestrator and conductor with bands such as Arcade Fire and McFly, as well as orchestrating the music for TV dramas, including the Bafta-winning Prime Suspect.

In 2006 Daryl was commissioned by KPM to write KPM 668 and 669 Our Grand Designs – a large orchestral work incorporating electronic instruments – which was recorded at Abbey Road Studios and released in 2007. Daryl has also worked as orchestrator for the feature films Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Warner Bros., 2009) and Bedtime Stories (Disney, 2008), and composed idents for Baileys's sponsorship of Films on 4. He orchestrated and arranged the music for the English National Ballet’s children’s ballet Angelina’s Star Performance and recorded the score for the ballet’s subsequent DVD release.