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Arthur Oldham
Arthur William Oldham OBE (6 September 1926 – 4 May 2003) was an English composer and choirmaster. He founded the Edinburgh Festival Chorus in 1965, the Chorus of the Orchestre de Paris in 1975, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra Chorus in Amsterdam in 1979. He also worked with the Scottish Opera Chorus 1966–74 and directed the London Symphony Chorus 1969–76. For his work with the LSO Chorus, he won three Grammy Awards. He was also a composer, mainly of religious works, but also a ballet and an opera. Biography Arthur Oldham was born in London in 1926. When he was age 14, his mother committed suicide by gassing herself in an oven, and he was brought up in Wallington, at that time in Surrey. He won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition under Herbert Howells. He then became Benjamin Britten's only private pupil at Aldeburgh between 1945 and 1951. (He claims that the bar lines on the manuscript of ''Peter Grimes'' were his work.) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Oldham
Arthur William Oldham OBE (6 September 1926 – 4 May 2003) was an English composer and choirmaster. He founded the Edinburgh Festival Chorus in 1965, the Chorus of the Orchestre de Paris in 1975, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra Chorus in Amsterdam in 1979. He also worked with the Scottish Opera Chorus 1966–74 and directed the London Symphony Chorus 1969–76. For his work with the LSO Chorus, he won three Grammy Awards. He was also a composer, mainly of religious works, but also a ballet and an opera. Biography Arthur Oldham was born in London in 1926. When he was age 14, his mother committed suicide by gassing herself in an oven, and he was brought up in Wallington, at that time in Surrey. He won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition under Herbert Howells. He then became Benjamin Britten's only private pupil at Aldeburgh between 1945 and 1951. (He claims that the bar lines on the manuscript of ''Peter Grimes'' were his work.) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rambert Dance Company
Rambert (known as Rambert Dance Company before 2014) is a leading British dance company. Formed at the start of the 20th century as a classical ballet company, it exerted a great deal of influence on the development of dance in the United Kingdom, and today, as a contemporary dance company, continues to be one of the world's most renowned dance companies. It has previously been known as the Ballet Club, and the Ballet Rambert. History Dame Marie Rambert (1888–1982), founder of Rambert Dance Company, was born in Warsaw, Poland where she was inspired to become a dancer after seeing Isadora Duncan perform. She went to Paris and after an early career as a recital artist and teacher she was engaged by Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes as assistant to the choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky on ''The Rite of Spring''. She also taught Eurhythmics, Dalcroze Eurythmics to the company. During her year with the Ballets Russes her appreciation of classical ballet developed thus combining a love ... [...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] |
Michael Tippett
Sir Michael Kemp Tippett (2 January 1905 – 8 January 1998) was an English composer who rose to prominence during and immediately after the Second World War. In his lifetime he was sometimes ranked with his contemporary Benjamin Britten as one of the leading British composers of the 20th century. Among his best-known works are the oratorio ''A Child of Our Time'', the orchestral '' Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli'', and the opera ''The Midsummer Marriage''. Tippett's talent developed slowly. He withdrew or destroyed his earliest compositions, and was 30 before any of his works were published. Until the mid-to-late 1950s his music was broadly lyrical in character, before changing to a more astringent and experimental style. New influences, including those of jazz and blues after his first visit to America in 1965, became increasingly evident in his compositions. While Tippett's stature with the public continued to grow, not all critics approved of these changes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Humphrey Searle
Humphrey Searle (26 August 1915 – 12 May 1982) was an English composer and writer on music. His music combines aspects of late Romanticism and modernist serialism, particularly reminiscent of his primary influences, Franz Liszt, Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, who was briefly his teacher. As a writer on music, Searle published texts on numerous topics; he was an authority on the music of Franz Liszt, and created the initial cataloguing system for his works. Biography Searle was the son of Humphrey and Charlotte Searle and, through his mother, a grandson of Sir William Schlich. He was born in Oxford where he was a classics scholar before studying—somewhat hesitantly—with John Ireland at the Royal College of Music in London, after which he went to Vienna on a six-month scholarship to become a private pupil of Anton Webern, which became decisive in his composition career. Searle was one of the foremost pioneers of serial music in the United Kingdom, and used his role a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Imogen Holst
Imogen Clare Holst (; 12 April 1907 – 9 March 1984) was a British composer, arranger, conductor, teacher, musicologist, and festival administrator. The only child of the composer Gustav Holst, she is particularly known for her educational work at Dartington Hall in the 1940s, and for her 20 years as joint artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. In addition to composing music, she wrote composer biographies, much educational material, and several books on the life and works of her father. From a young age, Holst showed precocious talent in composing and performance. After attending Eothen School and St Paul's Girls' School, she entered the Royal College of Music, where she developed her skills as a conductor and won several prizes for composing. Unable to follow her initial ambitions to be a pianist or a dancer due to health reasons, Holst spent most of the 1930s teaching, and as a full-time organiser for the English Folk Dance and Song Society. These duties reduced ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lennox Berkeley
Sir Lennox Randal Francis Berkeley (12 May 190326 December 1989) was an English composer. Biography Berkeley was born on 12 May 1903 in Oxford, England, the younger child and only son of Aline Carla (1863–1935), daughter of Sir James Charles Harris, former British consul in Monaco, and Royal Navy Captain Hastings George FitzHardinge Berkeley (1855–1934), the illegitimate and eldest son of George Lennox Rawdon Berkeley, the 7th Earl of Berkeley (1827–1888). He attended the Dragon School in Oxford, going on to Gresham's School, in Holt, Norfolk and St George's School in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. He studied French at Merton College, Oxford, graduating with a fourth class degree in 1926. While at university he coxed the college rowing eight. He became an honorary fellow of Merton College in 1974. In 1927, he went to Paris to study music with Nadia Boulanger, and there became acquainted with Francis Poulenc, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger and Albert Rouss ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Classical Music Written In Collaboration
In classical music, it is relatively rare for a work to be written in collaboration by multiple composers. This contrasts with popular music, where it is common for more than one person to contribute to the music for a song. Nevertheless, there are instances of collaborative classical music compositions. Collaborations The following list gives some details of classical works written by composers working collaboratively. Opera and operetta * In 1656, ''The Siege of Rhodes'' was written in London, and is considered to be the first English opera. The vocal music is by Henry Lawes, Matthew Locke, and Captain Henry Cooke, and the instrumental music is by Charles Coleman and George Hudson. * In 1721, Filippo Amadei, Giovanni Bononcini and George Frideric Handel each wrote one act of the opera ''Muzio Scevola''. * Also in 1721, Michel Richard Delalande and André Cardinal Destouches jointly composed the opera-ballet ''Les élémens''. * Between the 1720s and the 1760s, François Fran ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Variations On An Elizabethan Theme
''Variations on an Elizabethan Theme'' (also seen as ''Variations on Sellinger's Round'') is a set of variations for string orchestra, written collaboratively in 1952 by six English composers: Lennox Berkeley, Benjamin Britten, Arthur Oldham, Humphrey Searle, Michael Tippett and William Walton. Imogen Holst also played an important role in orchestrating the overall work, but she did not write a variation of her own. The variations were written to celebrate the forthcoming coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953. (Benjamin Britten also wrote his opera ''Gloriana'' in honour of this occasion.) Background At the Aix-en-Provence Festival in July 1952, Benjamin Britten had attended the premiere of '' La guirlande de Campra'', a collaborative work by seven French composers, and this gave him the idea of inviting several English composers to join him in each writing a variation on a theme from the time of the first Queen Elizabeth to honour her modern-day successor. Lennox Ber ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edmund Rubbra
Edmund Rubbra (; 23 May 190114 February 1986) was a British composer. He composed both instrumental and vocal works for soloists, chamber groups and full choruses and orchestras. He was greatly esteemed by fellow musicians and was at the peak of his fame in the mid-20th century. The most famous of his pieces are his eleven symphonies. Although he was active at a time when many people wrote twelve-tone music, he decided not to write in this idiom himself. Instead he devised his own distinctive style. His later works were not as popular with the concert-going public as his previous ones had been, although he never lost the respect of his colleagues. Therefore, his output as a whole is less celebrated today than would have been expected from its early popularity. He was the brother of the engineer Arthur Rubbra. Early life He was born Charles Edmund Rubbra at 21 Arnold Road, Semilong, Northampton. His parents encouraged him in his music, but they were not professional musicians, t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Roland Petit
Roland Petit (13 January 192410 July 2011) was a French ballet company director, choreographer and dancer. He trained at the Paris Opera Ballet school, and became well known for his creative ballets. Life and work The son of shoe designer Rose Repetto, Petit was born in Villemomble, near Paris. He trained at the Paris Opéra Ballet school under Gustave Ricaux and Serge Lifar and began to dance with the corps de ballet in 1940. He founded the Ballets des Champs-Élysées in 1945 and the Ballets de Paris in 1948, at Théâtre Marigny, with Zizi Jeanmaire as star dancer. Petit collaborated with Constant Lambert (''Ballabile'' - 1950), Henri Dutilleux (''Le Loup'' - 1953), Serge Gainsbourg, Yves Saint-Laurent and César Baldaccini and participated in several French and American films. He returned to the Paris Opéra in 1965 to mount a production of ''Notre Dame de Paris'' (with music by Maurice Jarre). He continued to direct ballets for the largest theatres of France, Italy, Germ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frederick Ashton
Sir Frederick William Mallandaine Ashton (17 September 190418 August 1988) was a British ballet dancer and choreographer. He also worked as a director and choreographer in opera, film and revue. Determined to be a dancer despite the opposition of his conventional middle-class family, Ashton was accepted as a pupil by Léonide Massine and then by Marie Rambert. In 1926 Rambert encouraged him to try his hand at choreography, and though he continued to dance professionally, with success, it was as a choreographer that he became famous. Ashton was chief choreographer to Ninette de Valois, from 1935 until her retirement in 1963, in the company known successively as the Vic-Wells Ballet, the Sadler's Wells Ballet and the Royal Ballet. He succeeded de Valois as director of the company, serving until his own retirement in 1970. Ashton is widely credited with the creation of a specifically English genre of ballet. Among his best-known works are ''Façade'' (1931), '' Symphonic Varia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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