(Ed’-värd Greg) 1843–1907 Norwegian composer Of Scottish ancestry, Grieg first studied music with his mother, and later went to Leipzig (1858–62) to study with Ignaz Moscheles and Carl Reinecke, and with Gade in Copenhagen. There he became organizer of the Euterpe Society for Scandinavian Music and subsequently, in Norway, founded the Norwegian Academy of Music (1867). The ...
A range of metal percussion instruments are found in the western orchestra, many of which have ancient and global origins. Triangle The triangle comprises a slim steel bar, circular in cross-section, bent into an equilateral triangle (18 cm/7 in each side) with one corner open. It is played with a metal rod, and is suspended from a ...
(En-re’-ka Gra-na’-thos) 1867–1916 Spanish composer Born in Lérida, Granados studied with Pedrell in Barcelona and then in Paris. He later founded and directed a music academy in Barcelona. Like his compatriots Albéniz and Falla, he forged a new Spanish style, with strumming effects, ornamentation, modes and exuberant dance rhythms. His best-known works are the Goyescas (1911), two ...
1862–1934 English composer Bradford-born but of German descent, Delius escaped the family wool business to devote himself entirely to music. He studied in Leipzig, where he met Edvard Grieg (1843–1907), and moved to Paris, where his friends included Ravel, but also such painters as Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch. Affected by all these figures, and by ...
January Saville Theatre Concerts With a new record label (Lambert and Stamp’s Track Records) and the lure of America ahead, the year started well. The Who appeared at the Saville Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue for one of Brian Epstein’s Sunday Soundarama shows. Playing two performances on 29 January, the supporting bill included Track stablemates The Jimi Hendrix Experience, ...
Unlike the ‘New German School’ of Liszt and Wagner, Schumann did not pursue a path of radical experimentation in form and harmony; his style more aptly encapsulates German literary Romanticism in music, interpreting the rhythms and melodic shapes of German poetry and folk music through his own ardent and whimsical nature, and incorporating themes and ideas from Goethe ...
The story of classical music is not bound up simply with the traditions of any one country: it is tied up with the cultural development of Europe as a whole. This section attempts to pick out the composers from each successive age who, looked at from one point of view, exerted the greatest influence on their contemporaries and subsequent ...
Bayreuth in Bavaria had had an opera house, the Margraves’ Opera House, for 130 years before King Ludwig II contributed towards the construction of the Festspielhaus – the Festival Theatre. The foundation stone was laid on 22 May 1872, and the 1,345-seat theatre opened four years later (it has since been repeatedly enlarged and now seats 1 ...
1899–1974 American composer Although his heartland was the chiaroscuro world of jazz, Ellington transcended its boundaries, frequently lauded as ‘America’s greatest living composer’. A fine pianist, his keyboard skills were overshadowed by his writing abilities – evident in a multitude of jazz standards – and by his arranging. With the Ellington Orchestra he created dynamic unison passages using ...
1861–1908 American composer Although his training and early career were European, with studies in Paris and Frankfurt and posts in Darmstadt, MacDowell was a pioneer of American music, which he felt reflected ‘the youthful optimistic vitality and the undaunted tenacity of spirit that characterize the American man’. His strong European influences, with echoes of Grieg and Liszt ...
1858–1944, British Overcoming family resistance, Smyth studied composition at Leipzig Conservatory, where her early influences included Wagner and Berlioz and she met Grieg, Tchaikovsky and Dvořák. Her 1906 opera, The Wreckers, is now acknowledged to be an important contribution to British operatic repertoire. She has the disappointing honour of remaining the only woman to have ...
(Yo’-han Sa-bäs’tyan Bakh) 1685–1750 German composer Johann Sebastian Bach was born into a closely knit musical family of which he was rightly proud. His father Johann Ambrosius Bach (1645–95) had an identical twin brother, Johann Christoph (1645–93), who was like a second father to the young Sebastian. Johann was such a common name that almost all boys called Johann were known ...
b. 1970 Norwegian pianist A Eurovision Young Musicians finalist in 1988, he performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1989, made his Proms debut in 1991, and has since appeared regularly with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and other major orchestras. Praised especially for his Grieg performances, his repertoire also embraces Mozart, Schubert, ...
1882–1961 Australian composer Influenced by Grieg and by Delius, Grainger spent his early years as a concert pianist and, after that, in the US as a teacher. He was also particularly interested in folksong and much of his output consists of arrangements of such pieces. He is best known for such brief and catchy pieces as ‘Country Gardens’ ...
Initially a facet of the visual arts, the Expressionist movement was best delineated by the painter Vincent van Gogh, when he consciously used different colours and forms to express his feelings about a particular subject. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the art world embraced expressionist works as created by the likes of Munch and ...
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