HOME
*





Veronica Paeper
Veronica Paeper (born 9 April 1944) is a South African choreographer and dancer. Career Paeper was born on 9 April 1944 in Port Shepstone but trained with Dulcie Howes at the University of Cape Town Ballet School after her family moved to Cape Town. Although noted as South Africa's most prolific choreographer, Paeper was also a principal dancer with CAPAB, the PACT Ballet and the Orange Free State Ballet. Paeper choreographed her first ballet, ''John the Baptist'' to music by Ernest Bloch for CAPAB in 1972, leading to her appointment as the company's resident choreographer. In 1991, she became the company director of CAPAB and led the company on the first international tour of a South African ballet company, in 1994. She choreographed over 40 works for the company, including a number of full-length works such as ''Orpheus in the Underwold'', ''A Christmas Carol'', ''Hamlet'' and ''Sylvia in Hollywood''. She retired from CAPAB (now Cape Town City Ballet) in 2005. She was awarded a ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Port Shepstone
Port Shepstone is a large town situated on the mouth of the Mzimkhulu River, the largest river on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast of South Africa. It is located halfway between Hibberdene and Margate and is positioned 120 km south of Durban. It is the administrative, educational and commercial centre for southern Natal. History Port Shepstone was founded in 1867 when marble was discovered near the Mzimkhulu River mouth and is named after Sir Theophilus Shepstone of the Natal government of the 1880s. William Bazley built a harbour, and the first coaster entered the harbour on May 8, 1880. In 1882 a party of 246 Norwegian immigrants settled in the town and subsequently started to play a major role in the development of the area. Post the opening of the railway to Durban in 1901, the harbour fell into disuse and eventually the river silted up again, making it impossible to use. The 27,000-candela lighthouse still stands at the mouth of the Mzimkulu River. Norwegian settlers ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

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 nation ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Mendelssohn
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (3 February 18094 November 1847), born and widely known as Felix Mendelssohn, was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic music, Romantic period. Mendelssohn's compositions include symphony, symphonies, concertos, piano music, Organ (music), organ music and chamber music. His best-known works include the Overture#Concert overture, overture and incidental music for ''A Midsummer Night's Dream (Mendelssohn), A Midsummer Night's Dream'' (which includes his "Wedding March (Mendelssohn), Wedding March"), the ''Symphony No. 4 (Mendelssohn), Italian Symphony'', the ''Symphony No. 3 (Mendelssohn), Scottish Symphony'', the oratorio ''St. Paul (oratorio), St. Paul'', the oratorio ''Elijah (oratorio), Elijah'', the overture ''The Hebrides (overture), The Hebrides'', the mature Violin Concerto (Mendelssohn), Violin Concerto and the Octet (Mendelssohn), String Octet. The melody for the Christmas carol "Hark! The Herald ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

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 (music), Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition resulted in more than List of compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 800 works of virtually every genre of his time. Many of these compositions are acknowledged as pinnacles of the symphony, symphonic, concerto, concertante, chamber music, chamber, operatic, and choir, 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 Prince-Archbishopric of Salzburg, Salzburg, in the Holy Roman Empire, Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already competent on Keyboard instrument, keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of fi ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Verdi
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (; 9 or 10 October 1813 – 27 January 1901) was an Italian composer best known for his operas. He was born near Busseto to a provincial family of moderate means, receiving a musical education with the help of a local patron. Verdi came to dominate the Italian opera scene after the era of Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Vincenzo Bellini, whose works significantly influenced him. In his early operas, Verdi demonstrated a sympathy with the Risorgimento movement which sought the unification of Italy. He also participated briefly as an elected politician. The chorus "Va, pensiero" from his early opera ''Nabucco'' (1842), and similar choruses in later operas, were much in the spirit of the unification movement, and the composer himself became esteemed as a representative of these ideals. An intensely private person, Verdi did not seek to ingratiate himself with popular movements. As he became professionally successful, he was able ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Ravel
Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism in music, Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer. Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism (music), modernism, baroque music, baroque, Neoclassicism (music), neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, ''Boléro'' (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. Renowned for his abi ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

John Lanchbery
John Arthur Lanchbery OBE (15 May 1923 – 27 February 2003) was an English-Australian composer and conductor, famous for his ballet arrangements. He served as the Principal Conductor of the Royal Ballet from 1959 to 1972, Principal Conductor of the Australian Ballet from 1972 to 1977, and Musical Director of the American Ballet Theatre from 1978 to 1980. He continued to conduct regularly for the Royal Ballet until 2001. Lanchbery was widely considered (including by Nureyev) to be the greatest ballet conductor of his time, and to be ‘a conductor and music director of unmatched experience’ who was ‘directly responsible for raising the status and the standards of musical performance'. Maina Gielgud, Artistic Director of Australian Ballet, stated that "He anchberyis not only the finest conductor for dance of his generation and probably well beyond". One critic wrote that ‘the music was always on its best behaviour’ when Lanchbery was conducting. He was also famous for h ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin ( 1868 – April 1, 1917) was an American composer and pianist. Because of the fame achieved for his ragtime compositions, he was dubbed the "King of Ragtime." During his career, he wrote over 40 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first and most popular pieces, the '' Maple Leaf Rag'', became the genre's first and most influential hit, later being recognized as the archetypal rag. Joplin considered ragtime to be a form of classical music and largely disdained the practice of ragtime such as that in honky tonk. Joplin grew up in a musical family of railway laborers in Texarkana, Arkansas, developing his own musical knowledge with the help of local teachers. While in Texarkana, he formed a vocal quartet and taught mandolin and guitar. During the late 1880s, he left his job as a railroad laborer and traveled the American South as an itinerant musician. He went to Chicago for the World's Fair of 1893, which played a major part i ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Bizet
Georges Bizet (; 25 October 18383 June 1875) was a French composer of the Romantic era. Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his early death, Bizet achieved few successes before his final work, ''Carmen'', which has become one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertoire. During a brilliant student career at the Conservatoire de Paris, Bizet won many prizes, including the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1857. He was recognised as an outstanding pianist, though he chose not to capitalise on this skill and rarely performed in public. Returning to Paris after almost three years in Italy, he found that the main Parisian opera theatres preferred the established classical repertoire to the works of newcomers. His keyboard and orchestral compositions were likewise largely ignored; as a result, his career stalled, and he earned his living mainly by arranging and transcribing the music of others. Restless for success, he began many thea ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Haydn
Franz Joseph Haydn ( , ; 31 March 173231 May 1809) was an Austrian composer of the 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". 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 a friend and mentor of Mozart, a tutor of Beethoven, and the elder brother of composer Michael Haydn. Biography Early life Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Austria, a village that at that time stood on the border with Hungary. His father was Mathias Haydn, a wheelwright who also se ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Allan Stephenson
Allan Stephenson (15 December 1949 – 2 August 2021) was a British-born South African composer, cellist and conductor. Life Born in Wallasey, near Liverpool, he studied the cello in Manchester at the Royal Manchester College of Music before moving to Cape Town in 1973 to join the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra. He retained the position of associate principal cello until the CTSO closed in 1997. After landing in Cape Town on 13 January 1973, he quickly became involved teaching cello at SACS, and managed these two jobs until his fiancée Christine arrived from England to also teach at SACS. They were married in July 1973. He directed the UCT College Orchestra from 1978 to 1988 and taught as a part-time lecturer of both cello and composition at the University of Cape Town. A successful and well-known composer in South Africa, he composed one act of the ''Mandela Trilogy'', a three act opera documenting the three stages of Nelson Mandela's life. Mike Campbell and Peter Louis van Dijk ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]