28 JULY 2019

LARA POE  -  FINLAND/USA 
BORN 28 JULY

Lara Poe is a Finnish-American composer who is currently based in London. She has collaborated with musicians such as the JACK quartet, Dal Niente, Sound Icon, Semiosis quartet, Jonathan Radford, Laura Farré Rosada, Aija Reke, and Timo Kinnunen, and her works have been performed in the US, as well as the UK, Finland, Latvia, Germany, and Taiwan. She has received recognition in several competitions. In 2017, Poe received the BMI Student Composer Award William Schuman Prize for the most outstanding score, and was the winner of the 2016 American Prize in Chamber Music composition, student division. Poe was also a participant in the 2017 Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme, and her piece Mirror Rim was performed at the 2018 Aldeburgh Festival. She is currently taking part in the 2018-2019 LSO Panufnik Scheme. 

Poe is a recent graduate of the Royal College of Music, where she received an Mmus with distinction. At the RCM she studied composition with Kenneth Hesketh as her principal composition professor, and she also studied electroacoustic music with Gilbert Nouno. Prior to her studies at the RCM, Poe studied with Martin Amlin, Richard Cornell, Joshua Fineberg, Paavo Korpijaakko, Rodney Lister, Alex Mincek, and Ketty Nez. She received her Bachelor of Music degree from Boston University, and studied at the New England Conservatory Preparatory School while in grade school. While pursuing her bachelor’s degree, Poe received the both the Boston University’s Wainwright prize and Department of Music Theory and Composition award in 2016, and was inducted into the music honor society Pi Kappa Lambda in April 2016. 

Poe's current projects include Sonifying Noise Pollution, which is a collaboration with Royal College of Art graduate Jennifer Haugan. This project is an interactive, multimedia examination of noise pollution levels throughout the UK. Poe and Haugan presented Sonifying Noise Pollution at the 2017 IRCAM forums in April 2017, and are working to include more data points and more interactive features. Other projects include collaborations with saxophonist Jonathan Radford, the Megalopolis Saxophone orchestra, and accordion-percussion duo km2.

♫ LISTEN

Piano Concerto N.1 - II. Andante by Lara Poe

➺ Lara Poe's Website

LEONORA DUARTE  - BELGIUM  

Leonora Duarte was a Flemish composer and musician, born in Antwerp. She belonged to a wealthy Portuguese-Jewish family who were marrano, meaning they outwardly acted as Catholics while secretly maintaining their Jewish faith and practices. She was baptized on 28 July 1610.

Having been one of the six siblings, in the well known musical family of the Duartes, Leonora composed seven sinfonias which are apparently the earliest music written for viol by a woman in the 17th century.

The Duarte home was a center for music-making and had contact with many important families in the Low Countries and England, including one of the most influential Dutchman of all time in, regards to art and culture, Constantijn Huygens. Duarte wrote for violconsort. Her surviving compositions include seven fantasies for a consort of five viols.

As a young composer, Leonora Duarte wrote a set of seven abstract fantasies (one in two parts), written for five viols. These seven short pieces are in the late Jacobean style and called ‘Symphonies’. Her brother, Diego Duarte, set to music various poems by William Cavendish (1650s) and later the psalm paraphrases of Godeau (1673–85), which he dedicated to Constantijn Huygens. None of these works, possibly all for one voice with basso continuo, has survived today.

Leonora Duarte was never commissioned by the church or the court over her lifetime, but stood out in her musical family due to her compositional talent. Her father, Gaspar, was influenced so much by her work, that he hired a professional to transcribe her work and published in on his behalf.

Leonora was capable of combining her native talent with the latest ideas and theory in Italian and French music due to the rich traffic of visitors from all parts of Europe that regularly made it to the Duarte’s house on the Meir. Historical documentation provides ample evidence that the Duarte family entertained important relations with the great Dutchman, Constantijn Huygens. Influences can be noted and applied, regarding the Duarte family and their guests which at one time included, Dirk Sweelinck, son of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, the Dutch composer whose work helped mark the transition between the Renaissance and Baroque periods of music.

Leonora’s seven short sinfonias reflect the creation and compositional workings of Baroque music within the domestic sphere, where it would have originally been heard and performed.

♫ LISTEN

Sinfonia N. 1 by Leonora Duarte 

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25 JULY 2019

NINA SMEETS-RODRIGUES - BELGIUM  
BORN 25 JULY

Nina was born on the 25th of July 1986 in a musical family. She started listening to piano music from when she was still in the belly of her mother, Eliane Rodrigues, a Brazilian pianist and composer.

At the age of three, Nina suffered a big accident. After being for a long time in a coma, the doctors lost all hope. Miraculously she got conscious after repetitively listening to the 12th piano concerto from Mozart, played by her mother.

After graduating from high school, she followed her dream and went to study piano with Professor Levente Kende and her mother, Eliane Rodrigues, at the Antwerp Conservatory in Belgium.

She not only broadened her knowledge as a solo pianist, but also gained experience in accompanying vocalists (under the tutelage of Jozef de Beenhouwer and Lucienne Van Dyck), pianoforte (under the tutelage of Bart van Oort and Ayako Ito), musical analysis (under the tutelage of Wim Henderickx and Yves Senden) and chamber music.

After getting her Master degree, Nina made her debute concerts with her mother on stage in Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland. She took mastercourses with Kum-Sing Lee en Maria Szraiber, Pierre Amoyal and played in many international European festivals.

She played among others with Yuri Serov, Avi Avital, Lidia Kovalenko, Mikhail Zemtsov, Gavriel Lipkind, Dana Zemtsov, Wim Ilsen and Mathieu van Bellen.

In 2013 Nina plays the piano concerto of Gershwin in Switzerland with orchestra. After playing the concerto, she decides to play one of her own pieces as an encore. After a very positive feedback about her music, she starts playing other pieces written by herself on other concerts.

♫ LISTEN

Genesis: 1. The Garden of Eden by Nina Smeets-Rodrigues

➺ Nina Smeets-Rodrigues' Website

CLARA GOTTSCHALK PETERSON - USA 

BORN 25 JULY

Clara Gottschalk Peterson was the sister of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, composer and virtuoso pianist. She was a staunch protector of her brother's music in its original form.

♫ LISTEN

Staccato Polka by Clara Gottschalk Peterson

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5 JUNE 2019

KATHRYN MISHELL  - USA 

BORN 5 JUNE 

Kathryn Mishell was born in Los Angeles, where she received her early musical training. Her college and graduate work were done at Pomona College, The University of Kansas, and the University of Southern California. During these years she was a piano student of John Perry and a composition student of John Pozdro and then Ingolf Dahl.

Ms. Mishell’s works include over a hundred piano pieces, ensemble and orchestral works, and music for chorus, dance and theatre. She is the recipient of the 2011 Sylvia Glickman Prize from the International Alliance of Women in Music for her Piano Quartet. Rhapsody for Cello and Piano, composed in the summer of 2011, was played in Carnegie Hall on January 7, 2012 by the cellist Douglas Harvey and Eduard Laurel, pianist. Mishell has participated in the Women's Philharmonic New Music Reading Sessions, the Society of Composers National Conference, and has been guest composer at the University of Texas at Austin. She is one of two women composers honored by the National League of American Pen Women in 1996. She was the 1997 commissioned composer of the Texas Music Teachers Association, and has received ASCAP awards for the past several years. Commissions include chamber works for Trio Contraste, Chamber Soloists of Austin, the Arundel Trio, Pacific Serenades of Los Angeles, and Musiques en Euroreígion. She was Composer-in Residence for Austin Lyric Opera’s Armstrong Community Music School. Her published collections of pieces for piano students have sold thousands of copies nationwide. In 2014, she began a successful venture writing for film and television.

As pianist, Ms. Mishell has performed extensively in the U.S. and Mexico as a soloist and in chamber music. She has been touring pianist for the Sharir Dance Company, and for the music dramas Paganini! and Heroes and Lovers, for which she wrote the incidental music. She is a regular performer on Salon Concerts in Austin.

A teacher of many award-winning young pianists, Ms. Mishell has taught at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and has acted as clinician, adjudicator, and as consultant in the use of computers in music instruction. She maintains a class of private piano students in Austin, where she has twice been awarded the Outstanding Pre-collegiate Teaching Award.

In 2008, Ms. Mishell assumed the position of Artistic Director of Salon Concerts, presenting the finest chamber musicians in concerts in intimate settings. Its educational arm is CHAMPS, whose mission statement is to promote the playing and teaching of chamber music in the public schools. Now in its twenty-seventh season, she was a founding board member.

♫ LISTEN

Have a good day! by Kathryn Mishell 

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ANNELIES VAN PARYS - BELGIUM  
BORN 5 JUNE

Annelies Van Parys is a Belgian classical composer of chamber music, symphonic music, music for theatre productions and opera. Annelies Van Parys has won many awards for her work, such as Flandres-Québec, Jeunesses Musicales, Tactus, and Frere Darche and was awarded the prestigious Rolf Liebermann Prize for Opera (for the opera Private View).

Her work USHER was selected for the International Opera Awards 2018 in the category World Premières. In 2019 Annelies van Parys receives Klara Prizes for Composition and Music Personality of the year 2018 (Classical Music Awards). 

Listen to ‘Meditation’ (2005) by Annelies Van Parys and you will hear a distant bell sound in the opening bars hidden behind woodwinds and horns echoing a profoundly personal and human sound. In this work, she takes her first steps towards spectralism. This is a musical voice learnt from her teacher at the Royal Conservatory of Ghent, Luc Brewaeys. Other important sources of inspiration for her musical voice and whom she met during her further studies are: Jonathan Harvey, Thierry De Mey, Luca Francesconi, Judith Weir. 

Since 2008, Annelies Van Parys teaches orchestration, analysis and composition at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. She is also Honorary Ambassador of the Royal Conservatory of Ghent.

♫ LISTEN

Chacun sa Chacconne by Annelies van Paris

➺ Annelies van Parys' Website 

20 FEBRUARY 2019

AMANDA RÖNTGEN-MAIER - SWEDEN 

BORN 19 FEBRUARY

Amanda Röntgen-Maier (19 February 1853 – 15 July 1894) was a Swedish violinist and composer. She was the first female graduate in music direction from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm in 1872.

Maier performed violin concerts in both Sweden and abroad. She continued to study composition with the conservatory teachers Reinecke and Richter in Leipzig and violin from Engelbert Röntgen, concert master at Gewandhaus Orchestra in the same city. During this time she composed a violin sonata, a piano trio and a violin concerto for orchestra. Her violin concerto was premiered in 1875 with Maier as soloist and received good reviews.

In Leipzig she met the German-Dutch pianist and composer Julius Röntgen (1855–1932), her violin teacher's son. The couple married in 1880 in Landskrona and moved to Amsterdam. The marriage ended Amanda's public appearances, but she continued composing, and the couple arranged musical salons and music performances in Europe of Rubinstein, Joachim and Brahms.

In 1887 Röntgen-Maier became ill with tuberculosis. During her illness, the couple stayed in Nice and Davos. Her final major composition was the piano quartet in E minor on a trip to Norway in 1891. She died in 1894 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

♫ LISTEN

Violin Sonata III Movement by Amanda Röntgen-Maier

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DANIELLE BAAS - BELGIUM 
BORN 19 FEBRUARY 

Danielle Baas is a Belgian composer of Dutch origin. After her childhood in Africa, she attended the Jette’s school of music and carried on her studies at the Brussels’ Royal Academy of Music. Always fascinated by creating, she won a fourth prize at an international composition contest in the USA in 1997, as well as a composition contest for carillon.

Her works have been performed in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Bosnia, Spain, Germany, Tunisia, Brazil, China, Russia and the US. In 2001 she created the Mikrokosmos Ensemble aimed at promoting the creating of contemporary works and founded in 2005 the contemporary music Festival Emergence in Brussels. In 2004, the Ensemble receives the Fuga Award for the promotion of Belgian Musical Repertory. In 2005, she organizes a Belgian Contemporary Music festival, chamber music concerts in presence of the composers, the Festival Emergence. 

In 2010-2011, she organized concerts of women music based on the topic of ‘Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt’. In 2013, the Festival Osmose. Prix Fuga 2015 (personal Award).

♫ LISTEN

Goethe's Tribute by Danielle Baas

►DANIELLE BAASS' WEBSITE