About
For four decades, Kurt Bestor has written music for the moments words cannot hold — scores for film and television, songs built for the concert stage, and a body of work that has become part of family life across the Mountain West and beyond.
Kurt Bestor was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, into a family already shaped by music — his grandfather played trumpet in Midwestern big bands, and a great uncle performed in Jack Benny's band while composing popular works of his own. Music was less a decision than an inheritance.
The direction toward film scoring came later, and specifically: watching Jaws as a teenager set the goal that would define his career. In 1987 he was selected as one of only six fellows at the Sundance Film Institute's Film Composer Lab, studying under Dave Grusin, Alan Silvestri, and David Raksin — a formative season that pointed a Wisconsin kid with a trumpet toward a life writing for the screen.
Bestor's scoring career now spans more than 40 film scores and over 40 television themes, including the NFL's Monday Night Football theme, National Geographic Explorer, TBS's Wild! Life Adventures, and the IMAX film The Great American West.
His work with longtime collaborator Sam Cardon on ABC's coverage of the 1988 Winter Olympics earned an Emmy Award, and his score for PBS's A More Perfect Union received the Outstanding Film Score Award at the New York Film and Television Festival.
Bestor's first Christmas album, An Arius Christmas, was released in 1988 against considerable industry skepticism. "There was only one other album out there of contemporary instrumental Christmas music, by Mannheim Steamroller, and I was told that the three-month period from October through Christmas was too short to market a new record." He made the record anyway, and it became the first chapter of what would grow into the five-CD boxed set The Complete Kurt Bestor Christmas and one of the Intermountain West's longest-running holiday traditions.
His concerts now feature up to 45 musicians while holding onto an intimate, personal feel — over half a million people have attended his holiday performances across 27 years, joined along the way by guest artists including Jennifer Warnes, Melissa Manchester, Donny Osmond, Debbie Gibson, and Jenny Oaks Baker.
Christmas is one chapter of a much larger story. Prayer of the Children, described as a haunting musical prayer for peace, has been performed by choirs around the world and remains among his most widely sung works. In 2012, his arranging and producing of Jenny Oaks Baker's Wish Upon a Star earned both of them a Grammy nomination.
Bestor conducted his own music during the closing ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Olympics and carried the Olympic torch through Salt Lake City that year. In 2001, his oratorio Saints on the Seas was performed across European cities, with Bestor conducting the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Liverpool Orchestra and Choir. He has also written commissioned works for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra, and in 2014 released Outside the Lines, his first major non-holiday album since 2002.
Bestor donates significant time to charitable causes, performing as many as two benefit concerts a month for organizations including Primary Children's Hospital and community groups across Utah, where he continues to make his home.
He is married to Petrina, who was born in Kenya, and the two have traveled extensively across Africa together — in 2012 they climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. When he isn't composing or on stage, he can usually be found skiing.
“A bit like Garrison Keillor-meets-John Williams, with all 2500 audience members crammed into my front room.” Kurt Bestor, on his concerts
Four decades of music, still being written.
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