HELEN PERKIN - UK
BORN 25 NOVEMBER
Helen Perkin was born in London in 1909, and she began playing the piano at the age of three, receiving her first lessons from her mother, before studying under Arthur Alexander, who was a professor of piano at the Royal College of Music. By the age of sixteen, she was awarded scholarships in both piano and composition at the RCM, where she went on to study for a further six years.
After graduating, she travelled to Vienna with the aid of another scholarship to study piano and composition under two prestigious pedagogues: Eduard Steuermann and Anton Webern. As a pianist, her first broadcast was at the age of nineteen in a programme that included some of her own compositions. Then, in 1930, when Perkin was aged just 21, John Ireland dedicated his Piano Concerto for her to première at the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts, and this led to the beginning of Perkin’s flourishing concert career. In the 1930s alone, Perkin was to play the Ireland Concerto again several times, along with Beethoven’s First and Third concertos, Prokofiev’s Third Concerto, and Haydn’s G major Concerto. Her recital repertoire focussed primarily on French music, but she also championed the solo works of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, and Ireland alongside her own compositions.
The Four Preludes were written in the same decade and published in 1933, and they vary significantly in terms of character: i. Cortège; ii. The Wheel; iii. Shifting Sands; iv. Ambush. There are moments when the harmonic language looks to Vaughan Williams and indeed Ireland, but the use of parallel chords displays French qualities – Ravel’s piano music springs to mind.
Source: Robert Farnon Society and Gary Oshea
♫ LISTEN
Carnival by Helen Perkin
MARTI EPSTEIN - USA
BORN 25 NOVEMBER
BORN 25 NOVEMBER
Marti Epstein is an American composer. She is Professor of Composition at Berklee College of Music and the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
She began composition studies in 1977 while still in high school with Professor Robert Beadell at the University of Nebraska. She earned degrees from the University of Colorado (Bachelor of Music in Composition, summa cum laude, 1982) and Boston University (Master of Music in Composition, 1984; Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition, 1989). Her principal composition instructors were Charles Eakin, Joyce Mekeel, and Bernard Rands.
Dr. Epstein has received numerous awards and commissions. She was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and twice a fellow in composition at the Tanglewood Music Center, where she worked with Oliver Knussen and Hans Werner Henze. Composition prizes include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant, Fromm Foundation Commission, Lee Ettleson Composition Prize Bay Area Women's Philharmonic Composition Prize, and Friends and Enemies of New Music Composition
Her music has been performed in Europe and America by ensembles such as the San Francisco Symphony, the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Frankfurt, the Atlantic Brass Quintet, and Ensemble Modern. In 1992 she was invited by the City of Munich to compose her puppet opera, Hero und Leander, for the 1992 Munich Biennale for New Music Theater.
Dr Epstein's work for piano,Waterbowls, has been described as "a luminous study in quiet sonorities and the ache of memory". Writing for The Boston Globe, David Weininger writes Epsteins's music "has the feel of suspension in space, fragile and almost static..." The International Trumpet Guild Journal comments on her exploration of color in the Two Canons for Seven Natural Trumpets.
♫ LISTEN
Oil and Sugar by Marti Epstein
Oil and Sugar by Marti Epstein
Post Comment
Post a Comment