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Richard Watkins
Richard Watkins (born 1962) is a horn player. He performs as a concerto soloist and chamber music player. He was Principal Horn of the Philharmonia Orchestra from 1985 to 1996, a position he relinquished to devote more time to his solo career. He has appeared as soloist in the Royal Festival Hall, at the Barbican Centre and abroad with conductors such as Carlo Maria Giulini, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Leonard Slatkin, Giuseppe Sinopoli, Andrew Davis and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky. He is in great demand as a chamber musician and recitalist and has worked closely with pianists such as Barry Douglas, Peter Donohoe, Pascal Rogé, Barry Scott and Martin Roscoe. He is a member of the Nash Ensemble. His recordings include Sir Malcolm Arnold's two horn concertos for the Conifer Classics label, to great critical acclaim, and Mozart's '' Sinfonia Concertante'' with the Philharmonia and Giuseppe Sinopoli for Deutsche Grammophon; other recordings include the Mozart Horn Concertos with Richa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
French Horn
The French horn (since the 1930s known simply as the horn in professional music circles) is a brass instrument made of tubing wrapped into a coil with a flared bell. The double horn in F/B (technically a variety of German horn) is the horn most often used by players in professional orchestras and bands, although the descant and triple horn have become increasingly popular. A musician who plays a horn is known as a list of horn players, horn player or hornist. Pitch is controlled through the combination of the following factors: speed of air through the instrument (controlled by the player's lungs and thoracic diaphragm); diameter and tension of lip aperture (by the player's lip muscles—the embouchure) in the mouthpiece; plus, in a modern horn, the operation of Brass instrument valve, valves by the left hand, which route the air into extra sections of tubing. Most horns have lever-operated rotary valves, but some, especially older horns, use piston valves (similar to a trumpet's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sir Malcolm Arnold
Sir Malcolm Henry Arnold (21 October 1921 – 23 September 2006) was an English composer. His works feature music in many genres, including a cycle of nine symphonies, numerous concertos, concert works, chamber music, choral music and music for brass band and wind band. His style is tonal and rejoices in lively rhythms, brilliant orchestration, and an unabashed tunefulness. He wrote extensively for the theatre, with five ballets specially commissioned by the Royal Ballet, as well as two operas and a musical. He also produced scores for more than a hundred films, among these ''The Bridge on the River Kwai'' (1957), for which he won an Oscar. Early life Malcolm Arnold was born in Northampton, Northamptonshire, England, the youngest of five children from a prosperous Northampton family of shoemakers. Although shoemakers, his family was full of musicians; both of his parents were pianists, and his aunt was a violinist. His great great grandfather was the composer William Hawes, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Esa-Pekka Salonen (; born 30 June 1958) is a Finnish orchestral conductor and composer. He is principal conductor and artistic advisor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, conductor laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and music director of the San Francisco Symphony. Life and career Early work Born in Helsinki, Finland, Salonen graduated from Helsingin Suomalainen Yhteiskoulu (SYK), one of the top high schools in Finland, in 1977 and then went to study horn and composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, as well as conducting with Jorma Panula. His conducting classmates included Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Osmo Vänskä. Another classmate on the composition side was the composer Magnus Lindberg and together they formed the new-music appreciation group Korvat auki ("Ears open" in the Finnish language) and the experimental ensemble Toimii (lit. "It works"). Later, Salonen studied with the composers Franco Donatoni, Niccolò Castiglioni, and Einojuhani Rautavaar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Colin Matthews
Colin Matthews, OBE (born 13 February 1946) is an English composer of contemporary classical music. Noted for his large-scale orchestral compositions, Matthews is also a prolific arranger of other composer's music, including works by Berlioz, Britten, Dowland, Mahler, Purcell and Schubert. Other arrangements include orchestrations of all Debussy's 24 Préludes, both books of Debussy's ''Images'', and two movements—''Oiseaux tristes'' and ''La vallée des cloches''—from Ravel's ''Miroirs''. Having received a doctorate from University of Sussex on the works of Mahler, from 1964–1975 Matthews worked with his brother David Matthews and musicologist Deryck Cooke on completing a performance version of Mahler's Tenth Symphony. Early life and education Matthews was born in London in 1946; his older brother is the composer David Matthews. He read classics at the University of Nottingham, and then studied composition there with Arnold Whittall, and at the same time with Nicho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nigel Osborne
Nigel Osborne (born 23 June 1948) is a British composer, teacher and aid worker. He served as Reid Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh and has also taught at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover. He is known for his extensive charity work supporting war traumatised children using music therapy techniques, especially in the Balkans during the disastrous Bosnian War, and in the Syrian conflict. He speaks eight languages. Osborne was born in Manchester, England, to a Scottish family. He studied composition with Kenneth Leighton, Egon Wellesz, and Witold Rudziński. His compositions include the opera ''The Electrification of the Soviet Union'', Concerto for Flute and Chamber Orchestra commissioned by the City of London Sinfonia, ''I am Goya'', ''Remembering Esenin'', and ''Birth of the Beatles Symphony''. Osborne retired from his Edinburgh University position in 2012, and is now working internationally as freelance composer, arranger and aid work ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dennis Brain
Dennis Brain (17 May 19211 September 1957) was a British horn player. From a musical family – his father and grandfather were horn players – he attended the Royal Academy of Music in London. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Air Force, playing in its band and orchestra. After the war he was principal horn of the Philharmonia and Royal Philharmonic orchestras, and played in chamber ensembles. Among the works written for Brain is Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1944). Other composers who wrote for him include Malcolm Arnold, Lennox Berkeley, Alan Bush, Gordon Jacob, Humphrey Searle and Mátyás Seiber. Brain was killed in a car crash at the age of 36. Life and career Early years Brain was born in Hammersmith, London on 17 May 1921 to a musical family. His mother, Marion, ''née'' Beeley (1887–1954), was a singer at Covent Garden and his father, Aubrey Harold Brain, was first horn of the London Symphony Orchestra and regarded ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wigmore Hall
Wigmore Hall is a concert hall located at 36 Wigmore Street, London. Originally called Bechstein Hall, it specialises in performances of chamber music, early music, vocal music and song recitals. It is widely regarded as one of the world's leading centres for this type of music and an essential port of call for many of the classical music world's leading stars. With near-perfect acoustic, the Hall quickly became celebrated across Europe and featured many of the great artists of the 20th century. Today, the Hall promotes 550 concerts a year and broadcasts a weekly concert on BBC Radio 3. The Hall also promotes an extensive education programme throughout London and beyond and has a huge digital broadcasting arm, which includes the Wigmore Hall Live Label and many live streams of concerts. Origins Originally named Bechstein Hall, it was built between 1899 and 1901 by C. Bechstein Pianofortefabrik, the German piano manufacturer, whose showroom was next door. The renowned British a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Matthews (composer)
David Matthews (born 9 March 1943) is an English composer of mainly orchestral, chamber, vocal and piano works. Life Matthews was born in London into a family that was musical, though not formally trained; the desire to compose did not manifest itself until he was sixteen, and for a time he and his younger brother Colin Matthews, also a composer, were each other's only teachers. The start of the 'Mahler boom' in the early 1960s, when the works of Gustav Mahler began to enter the regular British repertoire for the first time, provided a tremendous creative impetus for both of them; but although they have sometimes since collaborated as arrangers (in orchestrating seven early Mahler songs, for instance) and as editors (in the published version of Deryck Cooke's 'performing version' of the draft of Mahler's Tenth Symphony), as composers they have very much gone their separate ways. David Matthews read Classics at Nottingham University and afterwards, feeling himself still too ... [...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] |
Ethel Smyth
Dame Ethel Mary Smyth (; 22 April 18588 May 1944) was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works and operas. Smyth tended to be marginalised as a ‘woman composer’, as though her work could not be accepted as mainstream. Yet when she produced more delicate compositions, they were criticised for not measuring up to the standard of her male competitors. Nevertheless, she was granted a damehood, the first female composer to be so honoured. Family background Ethel Smyth was the fourth of eight children. The youngest was Robert ("Bob") Napier Smyth (1868–1947), who rose to become a Brigadier in the British Army. She was the aunt of Lieutenant General Sir Ralph Eastwood. She was born in Sidcup, Kent, which is now in the London Borough of Bexley. While 22 April is the actual day of her birth, Smyth habitually stated it was 23 April, the day that was celebrated ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Downes
Sir Edward Thomas ("Ted") Downes, CBE (17 June 1924 – 10 July 2009) was an English conductor, specialising in opera. He was associated with the Royal Opera House from 1952, and with Opera Australia from 1970. He was also well known for his long working relationship with the BBC Philharmonic and for working with the Netherlands Radio Orchestra. Within the field of opera, he was particularly known as a conductor of Verdi. He and his wife, Lady (Joan) Downes, committed assisted suicide at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland on 10 July 2009, an event that received significant media coverage. Early life and education Downes was born in Birmingham, England in 1924, the son of a bank teller. He began to learn the piano and violin at age five and was also a choirboy at King Edward's School, learning the organ and becoming choir master when his voice broke at 13. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reinhold Glière
Reinhold Moritzevich Glière (born Reinhold Ernest Glier, which was later converted for standardization purposes; russian: Рейнгольд Морицевич Глиэр; 23 June 1956), was a Russian Imperial and Soviet composer of German and Polish descent. In 1938, he was awarded the title of People's Artist of RSFSR (1935), and People's Artist of USSR (1938). Biography Glière was born in the city of Kiev, Russian Empire (now Kyiv, Ukraine). He was the second son of the wind instrument maker Ernst Moritz Glier (1834–1896) from Saxony (Klingenthal in the Vogtland region), who emigrated to the Russian Empire and married Józefa (Josephine) Korczak (1849–1935), the daughter of his master, from Warsaw. His original name, as given in his baptism certificate, was Reinhold Ernest Glier.S. K. Gulinskaja: ''Reinhold Morizevich Glier'' Moscow "Musika", 1986, (russian) About 1900 he changed the spelling and pronunciation of his surname to Glière, which gave rise to the legend, sta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
