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Jane's Minstrels
Jane's Minstrels was a virtuoso British new music ensemble set up in 1988 by the English soprano Jane Manning and her husband, the composer Anthony Payne. Its founder members were the horn player and conductor, Roger Montgomery, the pianist Dominic Saunders and the guitarist Stephanie Power; later they were joined by the clarinetist Dov Goldberg, the percussionist Richard Benjafield, the violinist Fenella Barton and the pianist/composer Matthew King among others. Jane's Minstrels established an international reputation as performers of a broad repertoire: the group has performed fantasias by Purcell, chamber works by Elgar, Frank Bridge and Percy Grainger as well as Schoenberg and Webern. Since the ensemble's beginning, Manning championed '' Pierrot lunaire'' and a number of twentieth century works influenced by it, ranging from William Walton's ''Façade'' to '' Miss Donnithorne's Maggot'' by Peter Maxwell Davies. The critic Ivan Hewett wrote of the group in 2010: Twen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jane Manning
Jane Marian Manning OBE (20 September 193831 March 2021) was an English concert and opera soprano, writer on music, and visiting professor at the Royal College of Music. A specialist in contemporary classical music, she was described by one critic as "the irrepressible, incomparable, unstoppable Ms. Manning – life and soul of British contemporary music". Manning and her husband, the composer Anthony Payne were avid supporters of contemporary British music. They founded the virtuoso new music group Jane's Minstrels and many of Payne's works were premiered by Manning and the ensemble. Early life Manning was born in Norwich on 20 September 1938 to Gerald Manville Manning and Lily Manning (née Thompson). She was educated at Norwich High School for Girls, the Royal Academy of Music (graduating LRAM in 1958), and the Scuola di Canto at Cureglia, Switzerland. She was promoted to ARCM in 1962."Manning, Jane Marian", in ''Who's Who 2009'', A & C Black, 2008. She describe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Walton
Sir William Turner Walton (29 March 19028 March 1983) was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera. His best-known works include ''Façade'', the cantata ''Belshazzar's Feast'', the Viola Concerto, the First Symphony, and the British coronation marches ''Crown Imperial'' and '' Orb and Sceptre''. Born in Oldham, Lancashire, the son of a musician, Walton was a chorister and then an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford. On leaving the university, he was taken up by the literary Sitwell siblings, who provided him with a home and a cultural education. His earliest work of note was a collaboration with Edith Sitwell, ''Façade'', which at first brought him notoriety as a modernist, but later became a popular ballet score. In middle age, Walton left Britain and set up home with his young wife Susana on the Italian island of Ischia. By this time, he had ceased to be regarded as a moderni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James MacMillan (composer)
Sir James Loy MacMillan, (born 16 July 1959) is a Scottish classical composer and conductor. Early life MacMillan was born at Kilwinning, in North Ayrshire, but lived in the East Ayrshire town of Cumnock until 1977. His father is James MacMillan and his mother is Ellen MacMillan (née Loy). He studied composition at the University of Edinburgh with Rita McAllister and Kenneth Leighton, and at Durham University with John Casken, where he gained an undergraduate degree and then a PhD degree in 1987. At Durham he was a member of the College of St Hild and St Bede as an undergraduate student and the Graduate Society while studying for his PhD. He was a lecturer in music at the Victoria University of Manchester from 1986 to 1988. After his studies, MacMillan returned to Scotland, composing prolifically, and becoming Associate Composer with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, often working on education projects. As a young man he was briefly a member of the Young Communist League. R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brian Elias
Brian Elias (born 30 August 1948) is a British composer. Biography Brian Elias was born in Bombay, India, and has lived in the U.K. since he was thirteen years old. After studying at the Royal College of Music he undertook private studies with Elisabeth Lutyens. His first major orchestral work ''L'Eylah'' was premiered at the BBC Proms in 1984. He has since had his works performed and recorded extensively by leading orchestras and soloists including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Britten Sinfonia, Jane Manning, Roderick Williams, Natalie Clein, and the Jerusalem Quartet. Elias collaborated with Kenneth MacMillan on his final ballet ''The Judas Tree'', premiered in 1992 at the Royal Opera House. He has won two British Composer Awards - the first for his 2010 work ''Doubles'', and the second for his 2013 work ''Electra Mourns.'' Elias was featured in a Wigmore Hall retrospective in April 2021. He has taught composition at the Royal Academy of Music and the Purcell School, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Judith Weir
Judith Weir (born 11 May 1954) is a British composer serving as Master of the King's Music. Appointed in 2014 by Queen Elizabeth II, Weir is the first woman to hold this office. Biography Weir was born in Cambridge, England, to Scottish parents. She studied with John Tavener while at the North London Collegiate School and subsequently with Robin Holloway at King's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1976. Her music often draws on sources from medieval history, as well as the traditional stories and music of her parents' homeland, Scotland. Although she has achieved international recognition for her orchestral and chamber works, Weir is best known for her operas and theatrical works. From 1995 to 2000, she was Artistic Director of the Spitalfields Festival in London. She held the post of Composer in Association for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra from 1995 to 1998. Weir was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1995 Birthday Honours for se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elizabeth Lutyens
Agnes Elisabeth Lutyens, CBE (9 July 190614 April 1983) was an English composer. Early life and education Elisabeth Lutyens was born in London on 9 July 1906. She was one of the five children of Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton (1874–1964), a member of the aristocratic Bulwer-Lytton family, and the prominent English architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. Elisabeth was the elder sister of the writer Mary Lutyens.Dalton, James"Lutyens, (Agnes) Elisabeth (1906–1983), composer" ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, 2004. Retrieved 8 September 2020 Lutyens was involved in the Theosophical Movement. From 1911 the young Jiddu Krishnamurti was living in the Lutyens' London house as a friend of Elisabeth and her sisters. At the age of nine she began to aspire to be a composer. In 1922, Lutyens pursued her musical education in Paris at the École Normale de Musique, which had been established a few years previously, living with the young theosophical composer Marc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Maxwell Davies
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (8 September 1934 – 14 March 2016) was an English composer and conductor, who in 2004 was made Master of the Queen's Music. As a student at both the University of Manchester and the Royal Manchester College of Music, Davies formed a group dedicated to contemporary music called the New Music Manchester with fellow students Harrison Birtwistle, Alexander Goehr, Elgar Howarth and John Ogdon. Davies’s compositions include eight works for the stage—from the monodrama ''Eight Songs for a Mad King'', which shocked the audience in 1969, to ''Kommilitonen!'', first performed in 2011—and ten symphonies, written between 1973 and 2013. As a conductor, Davies was artistic director of the Dartington International Summer School from 1979 to 1984 and associate conductor/composer with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from 1992 to 2002, holding the latter position with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra as well. Early life and education Davies was born in Holly ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Miss Donnithorne's Maggot
Miss (pronounced ) is an English language honorific typically used for a girl, for an unmarried woman (when not using another title such as " Doctor" or "Dame"), or for a married woman retaining her maiden name. Originating in the 17th century, it is a contraction of ''mistress''. Its counterparts are Mrs., used for a married women who has taken her husband's name, and Ms., which can be used for married or unmarried women. The plural ''Misses'' may be used, such as in ''The Misses Doe''. The traditional French "Mademoiselle" (abbreviation "Mlle") may also be used as the plural in English language conversation or correspondence. In Australian, British, and Irish schools the term 'miss' is often used by pupils in addressing any female teacher. Use alone as a form of address ''Miss'' is an honorific for addressing a woman who is not married, and is known by her maiden name. It is a shortened form of ''mistress'', and departed from ''misses/missus'' which became used to signify ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Façade (entertainment)
''Façade'' is a series of poems by Edith Sitwell, best known as part of ''Façade – An Entertainment'' in which the poems are recited over an instrumental accompaniment by William Walton. The poems and the music exist in several versions. Sitwell began to publish some of the ''Façade'' poems in 1918, in the literary magazine ''Wheels''. In 1922 many of them were given an orchestral accompaniment by Walton, Sitwell's protégé. The "entertainment" was first performed in public on 12 June 1923 at the Aeolian Hall in London, and achieved both fame and notoriety for its unconventional form. Walton arranged two suites of his music for full orchestra. When Frederick Ashton made a ballet of ''Façade'' in 1931, Sitwell did not wish her poems to be part of it, and the orchestral arrangements were used. After Sitwell's death, Walton published supplementary versions of ''Façade'' for speaker and small ensemble using numbers dropped between the premiere and the publication of the f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pierrot Lunaire
''Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds "Pierrot lunaire"'' ("Three times Seven Poems from Albert Giraud's 'Pierrot lunaire), commonly known simply as ''Pierrot lunaire'', Op. 21 ("Moonstruck Pierrot" or "Pierrot in the Moonlight"), is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of 21 selected poems from Albert Giraud's cycle of the same name as translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben. The work is written for reciter (voice-type unspecified in the score, but traditionally performed by a soprano) who delivers the poems in the ''Sprechstimme'' style accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble. Schoenberg had previously used a combination of spoken text with instrumental accompaniment, called "melodrama", in the summer-wind narrative of the ''Gurre-Lieder'', which was a fashionable musical style popular at the end of the nineteenth century. Though the music is atonal, it does not employ Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, which he did not use until 1921. ''Pier ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anthony Payne
Anthony Edward Payne (2 August 1936 – 30 April 2021) was an English composer, music critic and musicologist. He is best known for his acclaimed completion of Edward Elgar's third symphony, which subsequently gained wide acceptance into Elgar's ''oeuvre''. Apart from opera, his own works include representatives of most traditional genres, and although he made substantial contributions to orchestral and choral repertoire, he is particularly noted for his chamber music. Many of these chamber works were written for his wife, the soprano Jane Manning, and the new music ensemble Jane's Minstrels, which he founded with Manning in 1988. Initially an unrelenting proponent of modernist music, by the 1980s his compositions had embraced aspects of the late romanticism of England, described by his colleague Susan Bradshaw as "modernized nostalgia". His mature style is thus characterised by a highly individualised combination of modernism and English romanticism, as well as numerology, w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Webern
Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern (3 December 188315 September 1945), better known as Anton Webern (), was an Austrian composer and conductor whose music was among the most radical of its milieu in its sheer concision, even aphorism, and steadfast embrace of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques. With his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern was at the core of those within the broader circle of the Second Viennese School. Little known in the earlier part of his life, mostly as a student and follower of Schoenberg, but also as a peripatetic and often unhappy theater music director with a mixed reputation as an exacting conductor, Webern came to some prominence and increasingly high regard as a vocal coach, choirmaster, conductor, and teacher during Red Vienna. With Schoenberg away at the Prussian Academy of Arts (and with the benefit of a publication agreement secured through Universal Edition), Webern began writing music of increasing confidence, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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