DORA BRIGHT - UK
BORN 16 NOVEMBER
Dora Estella Knatchbull (née Bright) was an English composer and pianist. She composed works for orchestra, keyboard and voice, and music for opera and ballet, including ballets for performance by the dancer Adeline Genée.
While at the Royal Academy of Music during 1881–89, Bright's teachers included Walter Macfarren and Ebenezer Prout. She was the first woman to receive the Charles Lucas Medal for musical composition, for her Air and Variations for String Quartet in 1888. Her circle of close friends there included fellow students Edward German and his fiancée Ethel Boyce.
In 1889, 1890 and 1892 she made concert tours of Germany, including Dresden, Cologne and Leipzig, with performances of her piano concerto in A minor. From around 1897, her own piano concert performances tailed off. She changed direction towards composing music for dramatic performances. An early success in this line came in 1903 when The Dancing Girl and the Idol, an oriental fantasy with words by Edith Lyttelton, was given an amateur production at a prestigious charity event in Chatsworth House. In 1904, the piece was performed at Chatsworth again, by royal request, as King Edward had missed the 1903 performance through illness.
She was also the composer for ballets created with Adeline Genée, in a collaboration which also involved the designer C. Wilhelm. These ballets included The Dryad, La Camargo and La danse.
Bright's Suite bretonne was performed at the Proms in August 1917. On 8 April 1937 she performed an orchestral piano concert for BBC Radio. On 28 April 1939 the BBC broadcast her playing from her home, Babington House.
Around 1940, Bright began to work for the magazine Musical Opinion. Her association with the magazine coincided with a re-directing of its editorial policy onto a sternly reactionary course and a decline in readership.
She died at Babington in 1951.Many of her works have not survived.
Source: Wikipedia and British Music Collection
♫ LISTEN
Variations for Piano & Orchestra by Dora Bright
HELEN BOWATER - NZ
BORN 16 NOVEMBER
BORN 16 NOVEMBER
Helen Bowater is a New Zealand composer. She was born in Wellington into a musical family, and studied piano and violin with Gwyneth Brown. In 1982 she graduated with a Bachelor of Music degree in music history and ethnomusicology from Victoria University of Wellington. She continued her studies in electroacoustic music with Ross Harris and in composition with Jack Body.
After completing her studies, Bowater worked as a singer, pianist and violinist with ensembles and choirs, and also worked in rock bands Extra Virgin Orchestra and pHonk and with the Victoria University Gamelan Padhang Moncar. She completed residencies at the Nelson School of Music and the Otago University in 1993, and was composer-in-residence with the Auckland Philharmonia in 1994, and at the New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University, in 2008-09.
Bowater has published professional articles in journals including Music in New Zealand. Her music has been performed internationally.
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