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Emanuel Ax
Emanuel "Manny" Ax (born 8 June 1949) is a Grammy-winning American classical pianist. He is a teacher in the Juilliard School. Early life Ax was born to a Polish-Jewish family in Lviv, Ukraine, (in what was then the Soviet Union) to Joachim and Hellen Ax. Both parents were Nazi concentration camp survivors. Ax began to study piano at the age of six; his father was his first piano teacher. When he was seven the family moved to Warsaw, Poland (where he studied piano playing at Miodowa school) and then two years later to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, where he continued to study music, including as a member of The Junior Musical Club of Winnipeg. In 1961 the family moved to New York City and Ax continued his studies at the Juilliard School under Mieczysław Munz. In 1970 he received his B.A. in French at Columbia University and became an American citizen. The same year, he received an honorable mention at the VIII International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. In 1973 he won the Yo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hong Kong Cultural Centre
The Hong Kong Cultural Centre () is a multipurpose performance facility in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong. Located at Salisbury Road, it was built by the former Urban Council and, since 2000, has been administered by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department of the Hong Kong Government. A wide variety of cultural performances are held here. Location The centre is located on the southwestern tip of Tsim Sha Tsui, on the former location of the Kowloon station of the Kowloon–Canton Railway. Adjacent to the centre on the west is the Tsim Sha Tsui Ferry Pier of the Star Ferry, while to the east are the Hong Kong Space Museum and Hong Kong Museum of Art. The historic Clock Tower stands between the centre and the pier. History As early as 1970, the Urban Council pressed for construction of a new cultural venue in Kowloon of the same modern standard as the City Hall in Central. The cultural centre project was formally announced in 1974 to be planned on the site of the former Kowlo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Century Rolls
''Century Rolls'' is a piano concerto by the American composer John Adams. Commissioned by Emanuel Ax, the work dates from 1997. Ax was the soloist in the concerto's premiere on September 25, 1997 in Cleveland, Ohio, with Christoph von Dohnányi conducting The Cleveland Orchestra. Ax, von Dohnányi and The Cleveland Orchestra made the first commercial recording of the concerto, for Nonesuch. Adams himself conducted the UK premiere on 1 November 1998, again with Ax as the piano soloist. Adams conceived the work after hearing the distinct sounds of a 1920s player-piano, and the work was "in part an attempt to recreate that initial response I had received to the sound of the piano as heard via the medium of the piano roll." He has said that the concerto is his view on "the whole past century of piano music". In addition to the temporal element ("Century"), the title refers to old piano rolls. Instrumentation Solo piano, 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, cor Anglais, 2 clarinets, bass ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marlboro Music School And Festival
The Marlboro Music School and Festival is a retreat for advanced classical training and musicianship held for seven weeks each summer in Marlboro, Vermont, in the United States. Public performances are held each weekend while the school is in session, with the programs chosen only a week or so in advance from the sixty to eighty works being currently rehearsed. Marlboro Music was conceived as a retreat where young musicians could collaborate and learn alongside master artists in an environment removed from the pressures of performance deadlines or recording. It combines several functions; Alex Ross describes it as functioning "variously as a chamber-music festival, a sort of finishing school for gifted young performers, and a summit for the musical intelligentsia". History Adolf Busch and his son-in-law Rudolf Serkin moved to Vermont in the 1940s as refugees from the Third Reich (Adolf Busch, who was not Jewish, left Germany as he was in opposition to National Socialist rule.) T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yo-Yo Ma
Yo-Yo Ma (''Chinese'': 馬友友 ''Ma Yo Yo''; born October 7, 1955) is an American cellist. Born in Paris to Chinese parents and educated in New York City, he was a child prodigy, performing from the age of four and a half. He graduated from the Juilliard School and Harvard University and attended Columbia University and has performed as a soloist with orchestras around the world. He has recorded more than 90 albums and received 19 Grammy Awards. In addition to recordings of the standard classical repertoire, Ma has recorded a wide variety of folk music, such as American bluegrass music, traditional Chinese melodies, the tangos of Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, and Brazilian music. He has collaborated with artists in diverse genres, including the singer Bobby McFerrin, the guitarist Carlos Santana, Sérgio Assad and his brother, Odair, and the singer-songwriter-guitarist James Taylor. Ma's primary performance instrument is a 1733 Montagnana cello valued at US$2.5 million ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frédéric Chopin
Frédéric François Chopin (born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin; 1 March 181017 October 1849) was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic period, who wrote primarily for solo piano. He has maintained worldwide renown as a leading musician of his era, one whose "poetic genius was based on a professional technique that was without equal in his generation". Chopin was born in Żelazowa Wola in the Duchy of Warsaw and grew up in Warsaw, which in 1815 became part of Congress Poland. A child prodigy, he completed his musical education and composed his earlier works in Warsaw before leaving Poland at the age of 20, less than a month before the outbreak of the November 1830 Uprising. At 21, he settled in Paris. Thereafterin the last 18 years of his lifehe gave only 30 public performances, preferring the more intimate atmosphere of the salon. He supported himself by selling his compositions and by giving piano lessons, for which he was in high demand. Chopin formed a fr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ludwig Van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven (baptised 17 December 177026 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. Beethoven remains one of the most admired composers in the history of Western music; his works rank amongst the most performed of the classical music repertoire and span the transition from the Classical period to the Romantic era in classical music. His career has conventionally been divided into early, middle, and late periods. His early period, during which he forged his craft, is typically considered to have lasted until 1802. From 1802 to around 1812, his middle period showed an individual development from the styles of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and is sometimes characterized as heroic. During this time, he began to grow increasingly deaf. In his late period, from 1812 to 1827, he extended his innovations in musical form and expression. Beethoven was born in Bonn. His musical talent was obvious at an early age. He was initially harshly and intensively tau ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 17565 December 1791), baptised as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition resulted in more than 800 works of virtually every genre of his time. Many of these compositions are acknowledged as pinnacles of the symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral repertoire. Mozart is widely regarded as among the greatest composers in the history of Western music, with his music admired for its "melodic beauty, its formal elegance and its richness of harmony and texture". Born in Salzburg, in the Holy Roman Empire, Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. His father took him on a grand tour of Europe and then three trips to Italy. At 17, he was a musician at the Salzburg court b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Haydn
Franz Joseph Haydn ( , ; 31 March 173231 May 1809) was an Austrian composer of the Classical period (music), Classical period. He was instrumental in the development of chamber music such as the string quartet and piano trio. His contributions to musical form have led him to be called "Father of the Symphony" and "Father of the String quartet, String Quartet". Haydn spent much of his career as a court musician for the wealthy Esterházy family at their Eszterháza Castle. Until the later part of his life, this isolated him from other composers and trends in music so that he was, as he put it, "forced to become original". Yet his music circulated widely, and for much of his career he was the most celebrated composer in Europe. He was Haydn and Mozart, a friend and mentor of Mozart, Beethoven and his contemporaries#Joseph Haydn, a tutor of Beethoven, and the elder brother of composer Michael Haydn. Biography Early life Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Austria, Rohrau, Habsburg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Hindemith
Paul Hindemith (; 16 November 189528 December 1963) was a German composer, music theorist, teacher, violist and conductor. He founded the Amar Quartet in 1921, touring extensively in Europe. As a composer, he became a major advocate of the ''Neue Sachlichkeit'' (new objectivity) style of music in the 1920s, with compositions such as '' Kammermusik'', including works with viola and viola d'amore as solo instruments in a neo-Bachian spirit. Other notable compositions include his song cycle ''Das Marienleben'' (1923), ''Der Schwanendreher'' for viola and orchestra (1935), the opera ''Mathis der Maler'' (1938), the '' Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber'' (1943), and the oratorio ''When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd'', a requiem based on Walt Whitman's poem (1946). Life and career Hindemith was born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, the eldest child of the painter and decorator Robert Hindemith from Lower Silesia and his wife Marie Hindemith, née Warnecke. H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Schwantner
Joseph Clyde Schwantner (born March 22, 1943, Chicago, Illinois) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer, educator and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 2002. He was awarded the 1970 Charles Ives Prize. Schwantner is prolific, with many works to his credit. His style is coloristic and eclectic, drawing on such diverse elements as French impressionism, African drumming, and minimalism. His orchestral work '' Aftertones of Infinity'' received the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Biographical information Schwantner began his musical study at an early age in classical guitar; this study also incorporated the genres of jazz and folk. He also played the tuba in his high school orchestra. His first compositional aspirations were noticed by his guitar teacher who consistently experienced Schwantner elaborating on pieces he would be studying. From this, Schwantner's teacher suggested he collect these ideas and create his own musical composition. One of his e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hans Werner Henze
Hans Werner Henze (1 July 1926 – 27 October 2012) was a German composer. His large oeuvre of works is extremely varied in style, having been influenced by serialism, atonality, Stravinsky, Italian music, Arabic music and jazz, as well as traditional schools of German composition. In particular, his stage works reflect "his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life". Henze was also known for his political convictions. He left Germany for Italy in 1953 because of a perceived intolerance towards his leftist politics and homosexuality. Late in life he lived in the village of Marino in the central Italian region of Lazio, and in his final years still travelled extensively, in particular to Britain and Germany, as part of his work. An avowed Marxist and member of the Italian Communist Party, Henze produced compositions honoring Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara. At the 1968 Hamburg premiere of his requiem for Che Guevara, titled ''Das Floß der Medusa'' (' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Tippett
Sir Michael Kemp Tippett (2 January 1905 – 8 January 1998) was an English composer who rose to prominence during and immediately after the Second World War. In his lifetime he was sometimes ranked with his contemporary Benjamin Britten as one of the leading British composers of the 20th century. Among his best-known works are the oratorio ''A Child of Our Time'', the orchestral '' Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli'', and the opera ''The Midsummer Marriage''. Tippett's talent developed slowly. He withdrew or destroyed his earliest compositions, and was 30 before any of his works were published. Until the mid-to-late 1950s his music was broadly lyrical in character, before changing to a more astringent and experimental style. New influences, including those of jazz and blues after his first visit to America in 1965, became increasingly evident in his compositions. While Tippett's stature with the public continued to grow, not all critics approved of these changes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
