Alex Baranowski’s scores infuse traditional compositional rigour with perceptive emotional depth. That combination makes the Tony Award-nominated artist a deft musical storyteller with versatile range: on his 2013 album Spheres, violinist Daniel Hope translates Baranowski’s “Biafra” into a mournful elegy—a sharp contrast from the whimsical, twinkling backdrop Baranowski created for a 2017 department-store TV ad starring Paddington Bear. Born in 1983, the London-based musician started playing violin at age five and grew up fascinated by both Gustav Holst’s The Planets, Op. 32 and The Beatles. Appropriately, he later studied sound technology at Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. Post-graduation, Baranowski became an assistant at the prestigious National Theatre before earning his big break scoring a new production of Hamlet and collaborating with electronic act Underworld on Danny Boyle’s theatrical adaptation of Frankenstein. From there, Baranowski’s career took off and continues to flourish: he teamed up with The xx on orchestral pieces performed both in the U.S. and the U.K., worked with John Tomlinson on the BBC’s 2018 World Cup theme and tapped into moodier and more sinister elements for the film score to a 2020 adaptation of A Christmas Carol.