30 SEPTEMBER 2019

MONIC CECCONI BOTELLA - FRANCE

BORN 30 SEPTEMBER

Monic Gabrielle Cecconi-Botella (born 30 September 1936) is a French pianist, music educator and composer. She was born in Courbevoie and studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Maurice Duruflé, Jean Rivier and Henri Dutilleux. After completing her studies, she worked as professor of music theory at the Conservatoire of Aubervilliers. In 1983 became a professor of music analysis at the Paris Conservatoire.

In 1966 Cecconi-Botella won a First at the Grand Prix de Rome. Her opera Noctuaile won a Grand Prix du Disque French Academy. In 2008 she founded the Festival Seasons of the Voice in Gordes, Provence.

Cecconi-Botella explores multi-media arts in her compositions. Selected works include: Bucolique for flute and piano; Cérémonie for viola and piano; Noctuaile opera in two parts, libretto by René David; He Signed Vincent (about the life of Vincent van Gogh); The Woman of the Ogre, opera, book by Pierrette Fleutiaux and others.

Source: Wikipedia & Europeana

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Le Diplovegetaloordinatoanthropodocus by Monic Cecconi Botella

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ELEANOR ALBERGA - JAMAICA
BORN 30 SEPTEMBER

Eleanor Alberga (born 1949) is a Jamaican contemporary music composer. She decided at the age of five to be a concert pianist, though five years later she was already composing works for the piano.

In 1970 she won the biennial Royal Schools of Music Scholarship for the West Indies which she took up at the Royal Academy of Music in London, studying piano and singing. But a budding career as a solo pianist – she was was among the 3 finalists in the International Piano Concerto Competition in Dudley, UK in 1974 – was augmented by composition with her arrival at The London Contemporary Dance Theatre in 1978. Under the inspirational leadership of its Artistic Director Robert Cohan, she became one of the very few pianists with the deepest understanding of modern dance and her company class improvisations became the stuff of legend. These in turn led to works commissioned and conceived for dance from the company, most notably the piano quintet CLOUDS (1984). Alberga later became the company’s Musical Director, conducting, composing and playing on all LCDT’s many tours.

The orchestral works, SUN WARRIOR (1990) written for the inaugural Women in Music Festival and her dramatic adaptation of Roald Dahl’s SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARVES (1994) for large symphony orchestra and narrators, premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in 1994 with Franz Welser Möst and the LPO, helped build her growing reputation.

Her works include Chamber music, both in the more traditional form of three String Quartets and a Piano Quintet, and for more unusual line-ups, abounds. An unfolding series of Nocturnes – notably, SHINING GATE OF MORPHEUS and SUCCUBUS MOON – featuring horn and oboe respectively with string quartet, is an expanding project. Works for voice have more recently come to the fore with a luminous setting of George Herbert’s THE GLIMPSE and most recently the song cycle THE SOUL’S EXPRESSION to poetry by George Eliot, Emily Bronte and Elizabeth Barret Browning; both premiered by the baritone Jeremy Huw Williams.

Alberga now lives in the Herefordshire countryside with her husband the violinist Thomas Bowes and together they have founded and nurtured an original festival – Arcadia.

Source: Wikipedia and Elleanor Alberga Official Website

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String Quartet n 1 by Eleanor Alberga

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29 SEPTEMBER 2019

MARIA HESTER PARK - UK

BORN 29 SEPTEMBER

Maria Hester Park (née Reynolds) (29 September 1760 – 7 June 1813) was a British composer, pianist, and singer. She was also a noted piano teacher who taught many students in the nobility, including the Duchess of Devonshire and her daughters.

Her first public appearance was at the age of twenty-two as Maria Hester Reynolds in the Hanover Square concert series with a concerto on the harpsichord. She played a Clementi duet with Jane Mary Guest on 29 April 1783, a concerto at Willis's Rooms in March 1784 and a performance as Mrs Park ("late Reynolds") in May 1791. After her marriage in London in April 1787 to Thomas Park, an engraver turned antiquarian and man of letters, she ended her career as a performer, although she earned even more fame as composer and teacher. 

It has been said of Maria Hester Park that she was "hugely popular in the elegant drawing rooms of eighteenth century England" and that she "made her living composing the sort of music performed by Jane Austen heroines.". She has been described as "one of the most prolific of the 18th century women composers." Her works are varied, competent, and professionally arranged. Her sonatas, according to The Norton/Grove dictionary of women composers, are "varied and spirited." Her Sonata in C is stylistically close to Mozart, pleasant to the ear without being overly challenging either to the performer or the listener. Mozartean features apparent in her Sonata in F include a constant bass line of straight eighth notes that form the outlines of chords, and a distinct melody with ornamentation. There are also many basic scale patterns and simple arpeggios, and the majority of her pieces are clean, lacking the melodrama of later romantic works. Her surviving music spans a quarter of a century.

Source: Wikipedia & Spot Colorado

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Concerto pour piano by Marie Hester Park

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PERSIS VEHAR - USA
BORN 29 SEPTEMBER

Hailed by the New York Times for her musical “honesty, clarity and compositional skill”, Persis Parshall Vehar has had works commissioned and performed by leading orchestras, opera companies, ensembles, soloists and schools throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, & and South America. With over 300 compositions ranging from solo song to full orchestral works and operas, Vehar’s works have been performed at many of the leading concert halls throughout Europe and the United States, including the Royal Festival Hall (London), Graz Music Festival (Austria), Copenhagen Hall (Denmark), McMaster & Brock Universities (Canada), Uppland University (Sweden), Ohio State University, Piccolo Spoleto Festival (Charleston, NC) and Carnegie Recital Hall (NYC). She is the recipient of 30 annual ASCAP Plus Awards for excellence in composition and seven Meet the Composer Grants and is included in the International Museum’s Collection of Distinguished Musicians in London and the Biblioteque Internationale De Musique Contemporaine in Paris. Among her publishers are C. F. Peters and Boosey & Hawkes. Her compositions are broadcast regularly on National and International Public Radio & Television.

Vehar holds a Bachelor of Music from Ithaca College and a Master of Music from the University of Michigan, and had three years’ post- graduate study in New York City. Her private composition studies were with Warren Benson, Ross Lee Finney, Roberto Gerhard and Ned Rorem. She had additional advanced composition workshops with Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Leon Kirchner, Roger Sessions, Jacob Druckman and John Corigliano. Vehar frequently presents Master classes in composition at such institutions as SUNY Fredonia & Potsdam, Pittsburg State (KS), Austin-Peay State (TN), Wake Forest U. (NC), Syracuse U., and the Eastman School of Music.

Source: Persis Vehar Official Website

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Music of Eleanor Roosevelt Act 2 Scene 3 by Persis Vehar

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28 SEPTEMBER 2019

VIVIAN FINE - USA

BORN 28 SEPTEMBER

Vivian Fine (28 September 1913 - 20 March 2000) was an American composer.

Vivian Fine was born in Chicago. A piano prodigy, she became at age five the youngest student ever to be awarded a scholarship at the Chicago Musical College. At age eleven she became a student of Scriabin disciple Djane Lavoie-Herz. Fine composed her first piece at thirteen while studying harmony with Ruth Crawford, who considered Fine her protegée.

Fine made her professional debut as a composer at age sixteen with performances in Chicago, New York (Solo for Oboe, at a Pan-American Association of Composers' concert) and Dessau (Four Pieces for Two Flutes, at an International Society of Contemporary composers' concert). In 1931, the 18-year-old Fine moved to New York to further her studies. She was a member of Aaron Copland's Young Composers Group, and a participant at the first Yaddo Festival in 1932. In 1937 she helped found the American Composers Alliance and served as its vice-president from 1961 to 1965. In addition to her career as a composer, Fine continued to perform. In the 1930s she was perhaps the best-known performer of contemporary piano music in New York. She premiered works of Charles Ives, Copland, Brant, Cowell, Rudhyar, and others, and studied piano with Abby Whiteside from 1937 to 1946.

Notable in Fine's work is a sense of fun, either as a major element in the piece (The Race of Life, Memoirs of Uliana Rooney) or as a humorous section or reference inserted into a more serious piece (The Women in the Garden, Songs and Arias).

Fine wrote extensively for voice, employing the poetry of Shakespeare, Racine, Dryden, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Kafka, Neruda, and others in a wide variety of settings. She composed two chamber operas, The Women in the Garden (1978) and Memoirs of Uliana Rooney (1994). In The Women in the Garden, Fine used the writings of Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan and Gertrude Stein to fashion conversations among the four women and a tenor representing the various men in their lives. Memoirs of Uliana Rooney (1994), Fine's last major composition, is a contemporary opera buffa, with libretto and videography by Sonya Friedman. The work, autobiographical in spirit if not in factual detail, follows American composer Uliana Rooney as she journeys through the 20th century, surviving changing political climates and several husbands to ultimately triumph.

Source: Wikipedia & Vivian Fine Website

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Canticles from the other side of the river by Vivian Fine

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ESTHER SCLIAR - BRAZIL
BORN 28 SEPTEMBER

Esther Scliar was born in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, of parents Isaac and Rosa Scliar. Esther spent the first years of her life in Rivera, Uruguay, but her parents separated and Scliar moved with her father to Passo Fundo where she and her sister were raised by their aunt, Jayme Scliar Kruter. Scliar took piano lessons in Passo Fundo with Eva Kruter Kotlhar and Judith Pacheco. After her father remarried, she moved with him to Porto Alegre where she graduated from the American College and from the Institute of Fine Arts in piano.

After graduating, she taught piano and continued studies in composition at the Institute of Fine Arts, and later in Rio de Janeiro with H.J. Koellreuter and in Venice with Hermann Scherchen. In 1950 she attempted suicide, and later became a militant affiliated with the Communist Youth of the PCB.

Scliar worked as a pianist and taught harmony, music theory, analysis, and composition at the Instoituto Villa-Lobos and Seminários de Música Pró-Arte. In 1952 she studied choral conducting with Nilda Müller in Montevideo and founded and was the first conductor of the Choir of the Musical Youth Association of Porto Alegre. In 1966 she wrote the music for the movie The Loss of Mario Fiorani and received an award for "Best Song" at the Brazilian Film Week II.

In 1952 she found she had contracted tuberculosis, and in 1968 she had a stroke and left her position at Villa-Lobos Institute. Her father died in 1975, and she committed suicide at age 51.

Source: Wikipedia PT and Wikipedia

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Sonata Mov 1 by Esther Scliar

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27 SEPTEMBER 2019

ISIDORA ZEBELJAN - SERBIA

BORN 27 SEPTEMBER

Isidora Žebeljan (born 27 September 1967) is a Serbian composer and conductor. He is a professor of composition at the Belgrade Music Academy and a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Her music is highly acclaimed and she has won many important national awards, among them the Stevan Mokranjać National Music Award in 2004.

Isidora Žebeljan is also one of the most prominent Serbian contemporary composers of theatre and film music. So far she has composed music for more than thirty theatre productions in all significant theatres in Serbia, Norwegen, Croatia and Montenegro. For her work in the field of theatre music she was awarded the Sterija Award three times. She was also awarded the Yustat Biennial of Stage Design Award for best theatre music four times. In addition, Isidora Žebeljan worked on a number of film scores, including the orchestration of Goran Bregović's music for the films Time of the Gypsies, Arizona Dream and Underground (directed by Emir Kusturica), La Reine Margot (directed by Patrice Chéreau) and The Serpent's Kiss (directed by Philippe Rousselot). She composed the music for Miloš Radivojević's film How I was Stolen by the Germans. For this score she was awarded the Prize of the Film Festival in Sopot in 2011 (Serbia) and the FIPRESCI Prize of the Serbian Film Associoationin 2012.

Isidora Žebeljan also regularly appears as a performer (conductor and pianist) of her own works and of the works by other, mainly Serbian composers. She conducted concerts in London (with The Academy of St Martin in the Fields) and in Amsterdam (Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ), and performed as a pianist with Brodsky Quartet.

In 2017, Isidora Žebeljan has signed the Declaration on the Common Language of the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins.

Source: Wikipedia

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The Miracle in Shargan by Isidora Žebeljan

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NANNA LIEBMANN - DENMARK
BORN 27 SEPTEMBER

Nanna Magdalene Liebmann (September 27, 1849 – May 11, 1935) was a Danish, music educator, music critic, concert promoter and composer. She studied at The Royal Danish Academy of Music with Victor Bendix, Johann Christian Gebauer, J.P.E. Hartmann, Niels W. Gade, August Winding and Carl Helsted. At the conservatory she met composer Axel Liebmann, whom she married in 1874. He died soon afterward and she turned to composing and teaching music to support herself and her child. Most of her compositions are written between 1869 and 1914, and she wrote reviews for Dannebrog.

Source: People Pill and Wikipedia

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Thème passionné et variations by Nanna Liebmann

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26 SEPTEMBER 2019

GABRIELA LENA FRANK - USA

BORN 26 SEPTEMBER

Gabriela Lena Frank (born Berkeley, California, United States, September 1972) is an American pianist and composer of contemporary classical music.

Frank's work often draws on her multicultural background, especially her mother's Peruvian heritage. In many of her compositions, she elicits the sounds of Latin American instruments such as Peruvian pan flute or charango guitar, although the works are typically scored for Western classical instruments and ensembles such as the symphony orchestra or string quartet. She has said, "I think the music can be seen as a by-product of my always trying to figure out how Latina I am and how gringa I am." In recent years, compositional/philosophical links have been made to composers such as Béla Bartók, Benjamin Britten, and Chou Wen-chung.

Winner of a Latin Grammy and nominated for Grammys as both composer and pianist, Gabriela also holds a Guggenheim Fellowship and a USA Artist Fellowship given each year to fifty of the country’s finest artists. Her work has been described as “crafted with unself-conscious mastery” (Washington Post), “brilliantly effective” (New York Times), “a knockout” (Chicago Tribune) and “glorious” (Los Angeles Times). Gabriela Lena Frank is regularly commissioned by luminaries such as cellist Yo Yo Ma, soprano Dawn Upshaw, the King’s Singers, and the Kronos Quartet, as well as by the talents of the next generation such as conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin of the New York Metropolitan Opera and Philadelphia Orchestra. She has received orchestral commissions and performances from leading American orchestras including the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the San Francisco Symphony. In 2017, she completed her four-year tenure as composer-in-residence with the Detroit Symphony under maestro Leonard Slatkin, composing Walkabout: Concerto for Orchestra, as well as a second residency with the Houston Symphony under Andrés Orozco-Estrada for whom she composed the Conquest Requiem, a large-scale choral/orchestral work in Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. Frank’s most recent premiere is Apu: Tone Poem for Orchestra commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered by the National Youth Orchestra of the United States under the baton of conductor Marin Alsop. In the season of 2019-20, Fort Worth Opera will premiere Frank’s first opera, The Last Dream of Frida (with a subsequent performance by co-commissioner San Diego Opera) utilizing words by her frequent collaborator Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Nilo Cruz.

Frank is a freelance composer who left her native San Francisco Bay Area in the fall of 2015 to start a farm with her husband in the town of Boonville, California in Mendocino County. In 2017, she founded her own school, the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music for emerging composers to work with renowned performers. She travels frequently throughout North and South America. She is also often a guest artist at universities and conservatories, giving performances, lectures, and lessons.

Source: Wikipedia , Music Sales Classical & Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music

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Suenos de Chambi by Gabriela Lena Frank

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RUTH LOMON - CANADA
BORN 26 SEPTEMBER

A native of Montreal, Canada, Ruth Lomon was born in Montreal on 7 November 1930, and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 26 September 2017. She attended le Conservatoire de Quebec and McGill University. She continued her studies with Francis Judd Cooke at the New England Conservatory of Music and later with Witold Lutosławski at Dartington College in England.

From 1998 Ms. Lomon was Composer/Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University. Among the works completed during her tenure is the oratorio, “Testimony of Witnesses,” setting poetry of the Holocaust, for vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra. She composed this work for Boston Secession, a vocal arts ensemble (directed by Jane Ring Frank), who performed and recorded sections of it. She received a grant from the Hadassah International Research Center for completion of this work.

During 1995-96 Ms. Lomon was a fellow of the Bunting Institute, Radcliffe/Harvard where she composed Songs of Remembrance, a song cycle on poems of the Holocaust. This hour length work was premiered at the John Knowles Paine Concert Hall, Harvard University, and has since had numerous performances including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. in April ’98, and the IAWM Congress in London, England, in July ’99 where she received the Miriam Gideon Composition award for this work. “Songs of Remembrance” was recorded on the CRI label.

For many years Ruth and her husband Earle lived part of the year in New Mexico, where she became interested in the music and culture of Native Americans, and had the opportunity to attend a number of ceremonials. That experience is reflected in many of her works.

Source: Ruth Lomon's Official Website and Wikipedia

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Spirits by Ruth Lomon

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25 SEPTEMBER 2019

CONNI ELLISOR - USA

BORN 25 SEPTEMBER

Conni Ellisor (born September 25, 1953) is a contemporary American composer and violinist. She was trained at The Juilliard School and the University of Denver's University of Denver, Lamont School of Music, and rose to prominence as Composer-in-Residence of the Nashville Chamber Orchestra in the late 1990's. As a violinist, she has served as a member of the Denver Symphony, concertmaster of the Boulder Philharmonic, first violin in the Athena Quartet (now the Colorado Quartet), and is now a top-call studio musician and member of the Nashville String Machine.

Conni Ellisor’s contributions to the orchestral repertoire include such uniquely American works as Blackberry Winter for mountain dulcimer and strings,  and Whiskey Before Breakfast – Partita for Bluegrass Band and Strings. Blackberry Winter has generated widespread NPR airplay and was featured on All Things Considered. Her long and productive association with the Nashville Chamber Orchestra resulted in the premieres of 11 of her works. Three were recorded for broadcast by NPR’s Performance Today, and her “Conversations In Silence” became the title track on the orchestra’s 1997 debut album on Warner Bros. NPR Senior Producer Benjamin Roe’s comment that “the NCO truly is what’s new in classical music” is a testament to Ellisor’s groundbreaking contributions to the group’s repertoire. Among the pieces commissioned by the NCO was "Sea Without A Shore," written for orchestra, marimba and percussion and premiered by the NCO, Christopher Norton and world-renowned percussion ensemble Nexus. Other of her works have been premiered and recorded by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, London Symphony, Nexus Chamber Orchestra, Denver Brass, Camelli Quartet, New York Treble Singers, Hamburg Radio Orchestra and the London Philharmonic.

Source: Wikipedia and Conni Ellisor Official Website

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Conversation in Silence by Conni Ellisor

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LAUREN BERNOFSKY - USA
BORN 25 SEPTEMBER

Composer Lauren Bernofsky's catalog includes solo, chamber and choral music as well as larger-scale works for orchestra, film, musical, opera, and ballet. Her music has been performed across the United States, Europe, and Asia, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Iceland, Kenya, and South Africa.

Inspired by the expressive potential of each instrument, her distinctive language speaks both to musical history and the present day. The artistry of her orchestration grew out of her doctoral studies with master composer Lukas Foss. She holds degrees from the Hartt School, New England Conservatory, and Boston University. Her philosophy of composition is simple: music should be a joy both to play and to hear.

Her works have been commissioned by the Harford Ballet, the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra, the Delmar Trio, Jeffrey Curnow (Philadelphia Orchestra), and many others. Winner of the National Flute Association's Newly Published Music Competition for her Sonatine, her earlier awards include the Contempo Festival OPERA PUPPETS Mainstage Award and grants from the American Music Center, American Composers Forum, and National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts. Her trumpet concerto is frequently performed as audition and recital repertoire both in the United States and abroad.

Source: Lauren Bernofsky Official Website

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Two Latin Dances by Lauren Bernofsky

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