MARIA TERESA AGNESi - ITALY
DIED 19 JANUARY
Maria Teresa Agnesi was an Italian composer. Though she was most famous for her compositions, she was also an accomplished harpsichordist and singer, and the majority of her surviving compositions were written for keyboard, the voice, or both.
Maria Teresa first gained renown as a harpsichordist, earning the patronage of the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. (Milan was ruled by the Habsburgs in the eighteenth century.) Agnesi was also known as a vocal performer.
By the age of twenty-seven, she was also gaining recognition as a composer. In addition to chamber music, her first major work was a cantata; Il ristoro d’Arcadia, composed in 1747 but now lost, was dedicated to imperial delegate Gian Luca Pallavicini.
Her first opera, Nitocri, was composed in 1752 and survives. In the same year, Maria Teresa Agnesi married Pier Antonio Pinotti.
In the following year she composed another opera, Ciro in Armenia, which was produced at the ducal theater in Milan for the king of Poland. Her opera La Sofonisba (1765) was dedicated to the Habsburg emperor Francis I for the name day of his wife, the Empress Maria Theresa.
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MARINA DRANISHNIKOVA - USA
Marina Dranishnikova (1929 –94), the daughter of Vladimir Dranishnikov, a friend of Prokofiev and composer who made his living mainly as a conductor, appears to have studied piano and composition at Leningrad Conservatory.
If she wrote anything else other than the piece getting an outing in the Russia in the Round festival, Poéme for oboe and piano, it has proved impossible to discover. However, the work’s lyrical outpouring strongly suggests she was far from being a beginner in 1953 when she wrote it.
Described as a challenging work and lasting a little short of ten minutes, Poéme was dedicated to the principal oboe of the Leningrad Philharmonic and was apparently prompted by an ‘unhappy love’ for an oboist – the word ‘tragic’ has also surfaced!
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