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Noel Mewton-Wood
Noel Mewton-Wood (20 November 19225 December 1953) was an Australian-born concert pianist who achieved international fame on the basis of many distinguished concerto recordings during his short life. Life and career Born in Melbourne, he studied with Waldemar Seidel at the Melbourne Conservatorium until the age of fourteen. After further study at London's Royal Academy of Music, he took private lessons from Artur Schnabel in Italy. In March 1940, he returned to London for his debut performance at Queen's Hall, performing Beethoven's third piano concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Thomas Beecham. He then went on tour in the UK as assisting artist accompanying Viennese tenor Richard Tauber, and later performed in France, Germany, South Africa, Poland, Turkey and Australia. Mewton-Wood also possessed considerable talent as a composer. His string trio was featured on the Second Boosey and Hawkes Concerts held at Wigmore Hall on 27 March 1943. He also compose ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Melbourne
Melbourne ( ; Boonwurrung/Woiwurrung: ''Narrm'' or ''Naarm'') is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second-most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Its name generally refers to a metropolitan area known as Greater Melbourne, comprising an urban agglomeration of 31 local municipalities, although the name is also used specifically for the local municipality of City of Melbourne based around its central business area. The metropolis occupies much of the northern and eastern coastlines of Port Phillip Bay and spreads into the Mornington Peninsula, part of West Gippsland, as well as the hinterlands towards the Yarra Valley, the Dandenong and Macedon Ranges. It has a population over 5 million (19% of the population of Australia, as per 2021 census), mostly residing to the east side of the city centre, and its inhabitants are commonly referred to as "Melburnians". The area of Melbourne has been home to Aboriginal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gloriana
''Gloriana'', Op. 53, is an opera in three acts by Benjamin Britten to an English libretto by William Plomer, based on Lytton Strachey's 1928 ''Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History''. The first performance was presented at the Royal Opera House, London, in 1953 during the celebrations of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. ''Gloriana'' was the name given by the 16th-century poet Edmund Spenser to his character representing Queen Elizabeth I in his poem ''The Faerie Queene''. It became the popular name given to Elizabeth I. It is recorded that the troops at Tilbury hailed her with cries of "Gloriana, Gloriana, Gloriana", after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The opera depicts the relationship between Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex, and was composed for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953. Several in the audience of its gala opening were disappointed by the opera, which presents the first Elizabeth as a sympathetic, but flawed, character motivated ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky , group=n ( ; 7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. He wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the current classical repertoire, including the ballets '' Swan Lake'' and ''The Nutcracker'', the ''1812 Overture'', his First Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, the ''Romeo and Juliet'' Overture-Fantasy, several symphonies, and the opera ''Eugene Onegin''. Although musically precocious, Tchaikovsky was educated for a career as a civil servant as there was little opportunity for a musical career in Russia at the time and no system of public music education. When an opportunity for such an education arose, he entered the nascent Saint Petersburg Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1865. The formal Western-oriented teaching that he received there set him apart from composers of the contemporary nati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ludus Tonalis
''Ludus Tonalis'' ("Play of Tones", "Tonal Game", or "Tonal Primary School" after the Latin ''Ludus Litterarius''), subtitled ''Kontrapunktische, tonale, und Klaviertechnische Übungen'' (''Counterpoint, tonal and technical studies for the piano''), is a piano work by Paul Hindemith that was composed in 1942 during his stay in the United States. It was first performed in 1943 in Chicago by Willard MacGregor. The piece explores "matters of technique, theory, inspiration, and communication. It is in effect, a veritable catalogue of the composer's mature style." The piece, which music written in all major and/or minor keys, comprises all 12 major and/or minor keys, starts with a three-part Prelude (music), Praeludium in C resembling Johann Sebastian Bach's toccatas, and ends with a Postludium which is an exact retrograde inversion of the Praeludium. In between, there are twelve three-part fugues separated by eleven interludes, beginning in the tonality of the previous fugue and end ... [...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] |
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] |
Piano Concerto (Busoni)
The Piano Concerto in C major, Op. 39 by Ferruccio Busoni, is one of the largest works ever written in this genre. The concerto lasts around 70 minutes and is in five movements; in the final movement a men's chorus sings words from the final scene of the verse drama ''Aladdin'' by Adam Oehlenschläger, who also wrote the words of one of the Danish national anthems. The first performance of the concerto took place in the Beethoven-Saal, Berlin, Germany, on November 10, 1904, at one of Busoni's own concerts of modern music. Busoni was the soloist, with Karl Muck conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the choir of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche). The reviews were decidedly mixed, some being filled with outright hostility or derision. A year later, the work was performed in Amsterdam, with the Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Busoni himself and Egon Petri as soloist. The century following its premiere has seen relatively few performan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fantasia Contrappuntistica
''Fantasia contrappuntistica'' is a solo piano piece composed by Ferruccio Busoni in 1910. Busoni created a number of versions of the work, including several for solo piano and one for two pianos. It has been arranged for organ (by Wilhelm Middelschulte, dedicatee of the work, whom Busoni praised as "''Meister des Kontrapunktes''") and for orchestra (by Frederick Stock) under the composer's supervision. The work is in large part a homage to Johann Sebastian Bach's ''Die Kunst der Fuge''. Conversely, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji's ''Opus clavicembalisticum'' appears to be a homage to ''Fantasia contrappuntistica''. Sections and Piece analysis ''Fantasia contrappuntistica'' is written in twelve parts, and takes about 25 minutes to perform: #Preludio corale #Fuga I #Fuga II #Fuga III (on B-A-C-H) #Intermezzo #Variazione I #Variazione II #Variazione III #Cadenza #Fuga IV #Corale #Stretta The first ten pages of the introductory "Preludio corale" are nearly identical to the Third Ele ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ferruccio Busoni
Ferruccio Busoni (1 April 1866 – 27 July 1924) was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor, editor, writer, and teacher. His international career and reputation led him to work closely with many of the leading musicians, artists and literary figures of his time, and he was a sought-after keyboard instructor and a teacher of composition. From an early age, Busoni was an outstanding, if sometimes controversial, pianist. He studied at the Vienna Conservatory and then with Wilhelm Mayer and Carl Reinecke. After brief periods teaching in Helsinki, Boston, and Moscow, he devoted himself to composing, teaching, and touring as a virtuoso pianist in Europe and the United States. His writings on music were influential, and covered not only aesthetics but considerations of microtones and other innovative topics. He was based in Berlin from 1894 but spent much of World War I in Switzerland. He began composing in his early years in a late romantic style, but after 1907, when he publis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Piano Concerto (Bliss)
The Piano Concerto in B-flat, Op. 58, F.108, was written by Arthur Bliss in 1938 and premiered in 1939. It is a powerful work in the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition, and at the time it was hoped it could prove to be a British "Emperor" concerto. Nicolas Slonimsky described it as "Lisztomorphic in its sonorous virtuosity, Chopinoid in its chromatic lyricism, and Rachmaninovistic in its chordal expansiveness". Background Arthur Bliss had adjudicated at the Ysaye International Competition for Pianists in Belgium in 1938 and was particularly impressed with some of the competitors' performances. He wrote to his wife at the time: I have heard twenty-two pianists play the same piece by Bach, the same piece by Scarlatti, and expect to hear them sixty-three times more. Never again! ... I am learning a lot by listening to these young players — the standard is high — and my Piano Concerto is going to benefit from the experience. ... Hearing hour after hour so much brilliant pian ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Bliss
Sir Arthur Edward Drummond Bliss (2 August 189127 March 1975) was an English composer and conductor. Bliss's musical training was cut short by the First World War, in which he served with distinction in the army. In the post-war years he quickly became known as an unconventional and Modernism (music), modernist composer, but within the decade he began to display a more traditional and romantic side in his music. In the 1920s and 1930s he composed extensively not only for the concert hall, but also for films and ballet. In the Second World War, Bliss returned to England from the US to work for the BBC and became its director of music. After the war he resumed his work as a composer, and was appointed Master of the Queen's Music. In Bliss's later years, his work was respected but was thought old-fashioned, and it was eclipsed by the music of younger colleagues such as William Walton and Benjamin Britten. Since his death, his compositions have been well represented in recordin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geoffrey Tozer
Geoffrey Peter Bede Hawkshaw Tozer (5 November 195421 August 2009) was an Australian classical pianist and composer. A child prodigy, he composed an opera at the age of eight and became the youngest recipient of a Churchill Fellowship award at 13. His career included tours of Europe, America, Australia and China, where he performed the '' Yellow River Concerto'' to an estimated audience of 80 million people. Tozer had more than 100 concertos in his repertoire, including those of Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Medtner, Rachmaninoff, Bartók, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Gerhard. Tozer recorded for the Chandos label, beginning with the works of Medtner. He was regarded as a "superb recitalist" and had the ability to improvise, transpose "instantly" and reduce an orchestral score to a piano score at sight. Tozer won numerous awards and much recognition worldwide, but suffered comparative neglect in Australia, during the last years of his life. Early life Conceived in T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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