27 MAY 2019

CALLIOPE TSOUPAKI - GREECE 

BORN 27 MAY

Calliope Tsoupaki makes music that has a mood of timelessness. Her objective is expressing the essence as simply and clearly as possible. In her compositions she uses elements of early and contemporary music as well as the music of Greece and the Middle East. Combining these aspects, she skillfully creates a completely personal style.

Her music is praised for its melodic character, warm sound and emotional quality. To date her oeuvre consists of more than 100 works for diverse instrumentation and instruments from different cultures (qanun, ney, kemençe, hurdy gurdy, vielle, viola da gamba, pan flute), from solo to orchestral works, choral music, dance, theatre, opera and multi-sensory projects.

She has developed into one of the most defining composers of Dutch musical life, collaborating with, among others, Pierre Audi, Markus Stenz, Paul Koek, Jordi Savall, Kees Boeke, Frances-Marie Uitti, and ensembles including the Metropole Orchestra, Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Netherlands Bach Society, Ensemble Tetraktys, Neue Vocalisten Stuttgart, Asko|Schönberg Ensemble, Nieuw Amsterdams Peil, Ergon Ensemble and Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble.

Overwhelming successes include her opera Mariken in the Garden of Delights (nomination Matthijs Vermeulen Prize 2017), St. Luke Passion, song cycle Face of Love for singer Nena Venetsanou, oratorio Oidipous (nomination Matthijs Vermeulen Prize 2014), Narcissus(a play for music and scent), Maria for the Netherlands Wind Ensemble, the chamber operas Dark(about Joan of Arc, libretto Edzard Mik), Vita Nova (based on Dante’s book of the same title) and her three works for string quartet under the title Triptychon recorded on CD by the Doelen String Quartet (honorary mention from the Union of Greek Theatre and Music Critics in cooperation with the Foundation of Culture, Sport and Youth of the City of Athens). Click here to read more about her major works.

♫ LISTEN 

Passion by Calliope Tsoupaki 

➺ Calliope Tsoupaki's Website  

THEA MUSGRAVE - SCOTLAND
BORN 27 MAY

Rich and powerful musical language and a strong sense of drama have made Scottish-American composer Thea Musgrave one of the most respected and exciting contemporary composers in the Western world. Her works are performed in major concert halls, festivals, and radio stations on both sides of the Atlantic. 

In honour of her distinguished and varied catalogue and career over 60 years, the BBC presented Total Immersion: Thea Musgrave with three concerts of her chamber, choral, and symphonic works performed and recorded at the Barbican in a single day -- February 15, 2014. 

Known for the clarity of her invention, the skill of her orchestrations, and the power of her musical communication, Musgrave has consistently explored new means of projecting essentially dramatic situations in her music, frequently altering and extending the conventional boundaries of instrumental performance by physicalizing their musical and dramatic impact: both without programmatic content (such as the Clarinet Concerto, the Horn Concerto, the Viola Concerto, and Space Play), and others with specific programmatic ideas (such as the paintings in The Seasons and Turbulent Landscapes, the poems in Ring Out Wild Bells, Journey through a Japanese Landscape, and Autumn Sonata, and the famous Greek legends in Orfeo, Narcissus, Helios, and Voices from the Ancient World); -- all extensions of concerto principles. In some of these, to enhance the dramatic effect, the sonic possibilities of spatial acoustics have been incorporated: in the Clarinet Concerto the soloist moves around the different sections of the orchestra, and in the Horn Concerto the orchestral horns are stationed around the concert hall. Thus the players are not only the conversants in an abstract musical dialogue, but also very much the living (and frequently peripatetic) embodiment of its dramatis personae. 

Her 10 large-scale and several chamber operas of the past 40 years beginning with The Voice of Ariadne (1972) and followed by Mary, Queen of Scots (1977), A Christmas Carol (1979), Harriet, The Woman Called Moses (1984), Simón Bolívar (1992), Pontalba (2003) are in every sense the true successors to these instrumental concertos.

Musgrave has been the recipient of many notable awards including two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Ivors Classical Music Award 2018, and The Queen's Medal for Music. She was awarded a CBE on the Queen's New Year's Honour List in 2002.

♫ LISTEN

'A Suite O Bairnsangs' by Thea Musgrave

➺ Thea Musgrave's Website 

31 MARCH 2019

KONSTANTIA GOURZI - GREECE  

BORN 31 MARCH

Konstantia Gourzi spans bridges between cultures and epochs across time and space. She does this as a composer, where she finds her voice in unifying elements that seem to have nothing in common. She also does it as a conductor and teacher, where in consonance with others she constructs a new world of equal opportunities, between male and female, the strange and the familiar.

A Greek now living in Germany, Konstantia Gourzi was born in Athens in 1962. She knows that finding artistic authenticity today is a particular challenge. Even more so since technical progress offers composers almost unlimited access to the musical creations of all times and places. The more one is affected by different stimuli and the more one has to process them, the greater the challenge in finding a clear, yet individual artistic voice. However, the greater also the spectrum for inspiration.

As a composer, Konstantia Gourzi explores musical and sonic phenomena in her inexhaustible and constantly expanding range. Above all, she is interested in the intuitive, irrational parts of the human psyche. Her music is never purely intellectual or conceptual; her experiments are, at the core, based on a profoundly sensed experience. That means that intuition and sensual experience always play a vital role in her creative processes. In her music, she seeks to go beyond the limits of the rational, the definable, allowing the music to take its own shape from the forces within itself – where the distinction between fixed contours and improvisatory freedom is often transcended.

♫ LISTEN

Nine Fragments of an Eternity by Konstantia Gourzi

► KONSTANTIA GOURZI'S WEBSITE 

PARISA SABET  - IRAN 

BORN 31 MARCH

Iranian-Canadian composer, Parisa Sabet, creates a sonic world that is rich, layered, lyrical, and accessible to listeners. She draws from both the drama and the commonplace in her personal experiences to integrate unique elements of Eastern and Western musical languages, incorporating varied timbral and instrumental effects. Her repertory ranges from solo pieces to orchestral works, as well as sound design and original film scores. Since 2015, she divides her time between full-time freelance composer at night, and full-time mother by day—a new lifestyle that informs the gift of breakthrough in her compositions.

Professionally, her compositions have won various competitions and have been performed in different venues in North America. Sabet’s solo alto flute piece, Nay Nava, won the 2011 Timothy Munro (eighth blackbird’s flutist) Solo Flute Competition in conjunction with the CCPA composition program. In addition, Nawruz for wind ensemble was selected for the 2011 Chicago College of Performing Art’s Wind Ensemble Composition Contest and has been broadcast several times on Chicago's Classical and Folk Music Radio (98.7 WFMT). Her choral composition, Universal Brotherhood, was selected by MacMillan Singers to be performed at their Contemporary Showcase Concert in 2014. Her recent song cycle, Dance in Your Blood, based on three Rumi poems won the Top Prize place at the Violet Archer Composer’s Prize 2014 and is published in the Plangere Canadian Composers Series.

She has scored several documentaries centered on stories of Iranians who have been persecuted, exiled and migrated due to their beliefs including From Baku to Belmont and Layegheh directed by Rashin Fahandej. The most recent, Dust-Flower-Flame, about the Iranian poet Tahirih Qurratul-Ayn, a female poet in 19th century Iran, has been screened all around the world, including at Stanford University, University of Maryland, The Regent Street Cinema, UCLA, SVA Theatre New York, Toronto, Yale University, Concordia University, Le Nouvel Odéon, Laemmle Music Hall.

♫ LISTEN

Geyrani for Violin solo by Parisa Sabet 

► PARISA SABET'S WEBSITE