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Marcelle Meyer
Marcelle Meyer (; 22 May 189717 November 1958) was a French pianist. She worked with a group of composers known as ''Les Six,'' of whom she was the favored pianist. Biography Marcelle Meyer was born in Lille, France, on 22 May 1897. She was taught piano from the age of five by her sister Germaine, and entered the Conservatoire de Paris in 1911 at age 14, studying with Alfred Cortot and Marguerite Long and was awarded the "Premier Prix" at age 16. She then studied Maurice Ravel and Spanish composers with Ricardo Viñes. She coached with Claude Debussy about how to play his Preludes after having met him when she played the premiere performance of Erik Satie's ''Parade'' in 1917. Meyer became Satie's favored pianist and premiered Francis Poulenc's Sonata for piano four hands with the composer. She premiered several of his other works and recorded with him. In the early 1920s she played for Darius Milhaud and Igor Stravinsky. She became famous for her talent and gave recitals in En ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Piano Four Hands
Piano four hands (french: À quatre mains, german: Zu vier Händen, Vierhändig, it, a quattro mani) is a type of piano duet involving two players playing the same piano simultaneously. A duet with the players playing separate instruments is generally referred to as a '' piano duo''.Bellingham, Jane"piano duet" ''The Oxford Companion to Music'', Ed. Alison Latham, Oxford Music Online, accessed 31 March 2012 Music written for piano four hands is usually printed so that left-hand pages contain only the part for the pianist sitting on the left, while right-hand pages contain only the part for the pianist sitting on the right. The upper part (right) is called ''primo'' while the lower part (left) is called ''secondo''. Repertoire Arrangements By far the greater proportion of music "à quatre mains" consists of arrangements of orchestral and vocal compositions and of quartets and other groups for stringed instruments. Indeed, scarcely any composition of importance for any combin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Louis Durey
Louis Edmond Durey (; 27 May 18883 July 1979)Randel, Don Michael (1996)The Harvard biographical dictionary of music, p. 232. Harvard University Press. . was a French composer. Life Louis Durey was born in Paris, the son of a local businessman. It was not until he was nineteen years old that he chose to pursue a musical career after hearing a performance of a Claude Debussy work. As a composer he was primarily self-taught. From the beginning, choral music was of great importance in Durey's productivity. His ''L'Offrande Lyrique'' (1914) has been called the first piece of French twelve-tone music. The first of his works to gain recognition in the music world was for a piano duet titled ''Carillons''. At a 1918 concert this work attracted the interest of Maurice Ravel, who recommended him to his publisher. Durey communicated with his colleague, Darius Milhaud, and asked him to contribute a piano piece that would bring together the six composers who, in 1920 were dubbed ''Les Six ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Georges Auric
Georges Auric (; 15 February 1899 – 23 July 1983) was a French composer, born in Lodève, Hérault, France. He was considered one of ''Les Six'', a group of artists informally associated with Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie. Before he turned 20 he had orchestrated and written incidental music for several ballets and stage productions. He also had a long and distinguished career as a film composer. Early life and education Georges Auric began his musical career at a young age, performing a piano recital at the Société musicale indépendante at the age of 14. Several songs that he had written were then performed in the following year by Société Nationale de Musique. Along with his early successes professionally, Auric studied music at the Paris Conservatoire, as well as composition with Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum de Paris and Albert Roussel. Having gained recognition as a child prodigy both in composition and piano performance, he became a protégé of Erik Satie durin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (, , ; 5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost creatives of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements; and one of the most influential figures in early 20th-century art as a whole. The ''National Observer'' suggested that, “of the artistic generation whose daring gave birth to Twentieth Century Art, Cocteau came closest to being a Renaissance man.” He is best known for his novels ''Le Grand Écart'' (1923), ''Le Livre blanc'' (1928), and '' Les Enfants Terribles'' (1929); the stage plays ''La Voix Humaine'' (1930), '' La Machine Infernale'' (1934), ''Les Parents terribles'' (1938), '' La Machine à écrire'' (1941), and ''L'Aigle à deux têtes'' (1946); and the films ''The Blood of a Poet'' (1930), ''Les Parents Terribles'' (1948), ''Beauty and the Beast'' (1946), ''Orpheus'' (1950), and ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jacques-Émile Blanche
Jacques-Émile Blanche (; 1 January 1861 – 30 September 1942) was a French artist, largely self-taught, who became a successful portrait painter, working in London and Paris. Early life Blanche was born in Paris. His father, whose name he shared, was a successful psychiatrist who ran a fashionable clinic, and he was brought up in the rich Parisian neighborhood of Passy in a house that had belonged to the Princesse de Lamballe. Career Although Blanche received some instruction in painting from Henri Gervex, he may be regarded as self-taught. He became a very successful portrait painter, with a style derived from 18th-century English painters such as Thomas Gainsborough as well as Édouard Manet and John Singer Sargent. He worked in London, where he spent time from 1870 on, as well as Paris, where he exhibited at the Salon and the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. One of his closest friends was Marcel Proust, who helped edit several of Blanche's publications. He also knew H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Domenico Scarlatti
Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti, also known as Domingo or Doménico Scarlatti (26 October 1685-23 July 1757), was an Italian composer. He is classified primarily as a Baroque composer chronologically, although his music was influential in the development of the Classical style. Like his renowned father Alessandro Scarlatti, he composed in a variety of musical forms, although today he is known mainly for his 545 keyboard sonatas. He spent much of his life in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families. Life and career Scarlatti was born in Naples, Kingdom of Naples, belonging to the Spanish Crown. He was born in 1685, the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. He was the sixth of ten children of the composer and teacher Alessandro Scarlatti. His older brother Pietro Filippo was also a musician. Scarlatti first studied music under his father. Other composers who may have been his early teachers include Gaetano Greco, Francesco Gasparini, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
François Couperin
François Couperin (; 10 November 1668 – 11 September 1733) was a French Baroque composer, organist and harpsichordist. He was known as ''Couperin le Grand'' ("Couperin the Great") to distinguish him from other members of the musically talented Couperin family. Life Couperin was born in Paris, into a prominent musical family. His father Charles was organist at the Church of Saint-Gervais in the city, a position previously held by Charles's brother Louis Couperin, the esteemed keyboard virtuoso and composer whose career was cut short by an early death. As a boy François must have received his first music lessons from his father, but Charles died in 1679 leaving the position at Saint-Gervais to his son, a common practice known as ''survivance'' that few churches ignored. With their hands tied, the churchwardens at Saint-Gervais hired Michel Richard Delalande to serve as new organist on the understanding that François would replace him at age 18. However, it is likely Couperin b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach (28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his orchestral music such as the '' Brandenburg Concertos''; instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites; keyboard works such as the ''Goldberg Variations'' and ''The Well-Tempered Clavier''; organ works such as the '' Schubler Chorales'' and the Toccata and Fugue in D minor; and vocal music such as the ''St Matthew Passion'' and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach revival he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music. The Bach family already counted several composers when Johann Sebastian was born as the last child of a city musician in Eisenach. After being orphaned at the age of 10, he lived for five years with his eldest brother Johann Christoph, after which he continued his musical education in Lüneburg. From 1703 he was back in Thuringia, working as a musician for Protestant c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Igor Markevitch
Igor Borisovich Markevitch (russian: Игорь Борисович Маркевич, ''Igor Borisovich Markevich'', uk, Ігор Борисович Маркевич, ''Ihor Borysovych Markevych''; 27 July 1912 – 7 March 1983) was a Russian-born composer and conductor who studied and worked in Paris and became a naturalized Italian and French citizen in 1947 and 1982 respectively. He was commissioned in 1929 for a piano concerto by impresario Serge Diaghilev of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Markevitch settled in Italy during World War II. After the war, he moved to Switzerland. He had an international conducting career from there. He was married twice and had three sons and two daughters. Origin He was born in Kiev, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire (today Kyiv, Ukraine) to a family of Ukrainian Cossack ''starshyna'' who were ennobled in the 18th century. His great-grandfather Andrey Markevitch was a Secretary of State at the time of Alexander II of Russia, Actual Priv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alexis Roland-Manuel
Alexis Roland-Manuel (22 March 18911 November 1966) was a French composer and critic, remembered mainly for his criticism. Biography He was born Roland Alexis Manuel Lévy in Paris, to a family of Belgian and Jewish origins. He studied composition under Vincent d'Indy and Albert Roussel. As a young man he befriended composer Erik Satie, who helped him to make numerous influential connections. In 1911, Satie introduced Roland-Manuel to Maurice Ravel, whose pupil, friend and biographer he soon became. In 1947, he was appointed Professor of Aesthetics at the Conservatoire de Paris, where he remained until his retirement in 1961, making many contributions to musical theory and criticism, even assisting Igor Stravinsky by ghost-writing the theoretical work "The Poetics of Music". In addition to theoretical works, he wrote and composed various works for stage, especially comic operas, and screen, developing a partnership with director Jean Grémillon, for five of whose films he compo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Honegger
Arthur Honegger (; 10 March 1892 – 27 November 1955) was a Swiss composer who was born in France and lived a large part of his life in Paris. A member of Les Six, his best known work is probably ''Antigone'', composed between 1924 and 1927 to the French libretto by Jean Cocteau based on the tragedy ''Antigone'' by Sophocles. It premiered on 28 December 1927 at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie with sets designed by Pablo Picasso and costumes by Coco Chanel. However, his most frequently performed work is probably the orchestral work ''Pacific 231'', which was inspired by the sound of a steam locomotive. Biography Born Oscar-Arthur Honegger (the first name was never used) to Swiss parents in Le Havre, France, he initially studied harmony with Robert-Charles Martin (to whom he dedicated his first published work and violin in Le Havre. After studying for two years at the Zurich Conservatory, he enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire from 1911 to 1918, studying with both Charl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
