26 JUNE 2019

RAMINTA ŠERKŠNYTĖ - LITHUANIABORN 25 JUNE

Raminta Šerkšnytė first appeared as a vivid presence on the Lithuanian musical scene in the last decade of the last century and has up till now successfully maintained her position as one of the best known Lithuanian composers of recent times. In her creative work the language of postromantic music combines in a way that is individual to her with certain stylistic features of (post)minimalism, jazz, and the avant-garde. From her very first pieces, the composer's music surprised one by its intense emotional expression and rationally composed structures, the one in harmony with the other, with her mastery of form and instrumentation, with an intricate cobweb of rhythmic textures and an instinctive feel for harmony, resulting in the unusually strong artistic impression left by her work. The main sources for the composer's inspiration are the broad spectrum of psychological states and certain musical archetypes: ranging from calm, meditative (Aurei Regina Caeli), mysterious, mystical (Misterioso), nostalgic, melancholic (Adieu) to dramatic expression (Sūkurys 'Vortex') and outbursts of vital energy (Idée Fixe). On the other hand, many of her compositions remind one of picturesque musical landscapes, inspired by an exalted reflection on nature (Aisbergas 'Iceberg Symphony', Rytų elegija 'Oriental Elegy', Kalnai migloje 'Mountains in the Mist', Žara 'Glow', Vasarvidžio giesmė'Midsummer Song', Ugnys 'Fires').

Both as a composer and a pianist (performing her own work) Raminta Šerkšnytė regularly takes part in contemporary music events. Her music, performed by the orchestra Kremerata Baltica, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under the conductor Mariss Jansons, the violinist Irvine Arditti and the Arditti Quartet, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, and other musicians, has been heard throughout Europe, as well as in Asia, North and South America, and Australia in concert halls, such as the Wiener Musikverein, the Berlin Philharmonie, the Lincoln Center (New York), and elsewhere. Raminta Šerkšnytė's works have been presented at many festivals, among them, ISCM World New Music Days (Zagreb, Hong Kong, Vilnius, Ghent), Gaudeamus Music Week (Amsterdam), Klangspuren Schwaz (Austria), and the Vilnius Gaida festival.

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MARIA POMIANOWSKA - POLAND 

BORN 26 JUNE

Maria Pomianowska is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, composer and teacher. Professor of the Academy of Music in Cracow and director of the Cross-Culture Warsaw Festival. Since 1984 she has studied the unique techniques of playing European and Asian instruments. She has traveled to India, China, Korea, Japan and the Middle East. In 1994 she reconstructed two Polish folk string instruments, which have not been preserved to present times –Suka and Płock fiddle.

The artist has given concerts all over the world for the past 30 years. During her 5-year stay in Japan (1997-2002) she presented Polish traditional and classical music in the biggest music venues. On number of occasions she presented the reconstructed instruments and Polish music at the Imperial Court of Japan. She has composed and performed with world-famous artists: Pandit Ram Narayan, Yo-Yo Ma, Boris Grebenshchikov, Gil Goldstein, Gonzalo Rubelcaba, Ian Gilan, Branford Marsalis, Kayhan Kalhor, Hossein Alizadeh and others. She has released over 23 albums, many of which have received international awards.

Since 2011 she has created unique programmes featuring the Polish traditional music performed with Egyptia, Tunisian, Algerian, Pakistani, Senegalese, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Irani and Indian musicians in Asia and Africa.

Most significant distinctions and awards: the Chopin Passport, the Gloria Artis Medal awarded by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage (2010), the Award of the Mazovia Province Marshall (2011), the Silver Cross of Merit awarded by the President of the Republic of Poland, nomination to the Norwid Award (2014), Songlines Best music album (2016), Norwid Award in music( 2018).

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Step by Maria Pomianowska

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8 JUNE 2019

LENI ALEXANDER  - POLAND 

BORN 8 JUNE

Helene Alexander Pollak was born in Breslau, and her family lived in Hamburg and then emigrated to Chile in 1939 to escape the Nazis. 

She studied piano under the Montessori system of music and received a diploma in 1942 for teaching and worked with youth and disabled children while developing an interest in composition. Between 1949 and 1953, she studied with Fré Focke, Rene Leibowitz, and Olivier Messiaen. Between 1963 and 1968, she also studied electronic music and wrote a number of electronic pieces.

She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969 and lived for several years in Paris and Cologne. Besides new music classical compositions and musical theater, Alexander was active in composition for television soundtracks and composed for soap opera. In her later years, she composed several "hörspiel" pieces, or "plays for listening", several of them for the WDR Radio of Cologne. 

Alexander's compositions were mainly instrumental and were performed by orchestras in countries including Chile, Italy, France and the United States.

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Méralo by Leni Alexander 

MARGARET BUECHNER - USA    
BORN8 JUNE

Margaret Buechner was a German-born American composer.

Born in Hanover, she emigrated to the United States in 1951 and became an American citizen in 1961. She had studied composition and composed chamber music before the war; after she came to America, her teacher, Otto Luening, encouraged Buechner to write symphonic music. 

During the 1950s, her compositions emphasized ballet music scored for large orchestra. Her later compositions were dramatic symphonic and choral works, often with historical or patriotic themes. Her works include the ballets Phantomgreen and Elizabeth, along with tone poems The Old Swedes Church and Erlkönig(based on the Goethe poem). Other major works are two related to her adopted country: Liberty Bell for chorus and orchestra, which incorporates a 1959 recording of the actual bell by Columbia Records, and the "symphonic trilogy" The American Civil War. She died in Midland, Michigan, at the age of 76.

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Immensee/Elizabeth by Margaret Buechner 

17 MAY 2019

MARI VIHMAN - ESTONIA

BORN 17 MAY

Mari Vihmand was born in 1967 in Tartu, Estonia. In 1986-1990 she studied composition for B.M. at the Estonian Academy of Music with Prof.Eino Tamberg, and after further studies with Prof. Lepo Sumera received Master's degree in 1997. Parallel to her studies in Tallinn, Mari Vihmand in 1995-97 pursued her work as student of composition in Lyon, France, with Gilbert Amy and Philippe Manoury. 

Most of her works belong to chamber music, but there are also some orchestral pieces, choir music and children's songs. Her musical style could be characterised as having a restrainedly lyrical, and freshly sentimental quality. "I'm trying to find a balance between intellectual constructions and a highly emotional expression", she says. 

In 1995 she received the Estonian National Cultural Prize for her Chamber opera "A Story of Glass". In 1996 "Floreo" for symphony orchestra won First Prize at the UNESCO-sponsored contest "International Rostrum of Composers" in Paris, in the category of composers under 30 years of age.

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Eskiis 02 / Scetch 02 by Mari Vihmand

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JOANNA BRUZDOWICZ - POLAND 
BORN 17 MAY

Joanna Bruzdowicz is a composer, music critic and publicist. She was born in Warsaw on 17th May,1943. She studied piano under Irena Protasiewicz and Wanda Łosakiewicz and composition under Kazmierz Sikorski at the Higher State School of Music in Warsaw.

She began her artistic career as a pianist; she had already began she began giving concerts whilst still studying, and in the following years she toured Poland, Belgium, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. She co-founded the Polish section of Jeunesses Musicales and in 1964-68 she was the Secretary General. From 1968 to 1970 she received a scholarship from the French government and lived in Paris, where she studied composition under Nadia Boulanger, Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Schaeffer as well as musicology under Jacques Chailley at the Sorbonne. She co-founded the Groupe International de Musique Electroacoustique de Paris (GIMEP). In 1975, she moved to Tervuren near Brussels, where she stayed until 2000 with her husband Horst-Jurgenem Tittel, a high-ranking official of the European Union. Nowadays they live in Taillet near Perpignan in French Catalonia (Oriental Pyrenees). 

Apart from composition Joanna Bruzdowicz is involved with music criticism and journalism. She promotes new music on French, Belgian, German, and American radio shows. She leads master classes mainly at MIT, Yale University, the University of Southern California and University of California in Los Angeles, and at the Sorbonne in Paris, Université de Montreal. She also founded the Frederic Chopin and Karol Szymanowski Society of Belgium in 1983. In 1996 she founded an annual International Music Festival in Ceret, Franch, which taes place in the summer and is dedicated to composers as well as performers from the first three countries to introduce democratic constitutions: United States of America, Poland, and France as well as Catalonian composers (both French and Spanish).

In 2006, she opened CAT.Studios in Perpignan – a cinema production-distribution company and studio for film music. She is one of the studio's four directors. She composes film scores and is also the author (along with her husband) of numerous film scripts, including 36 films for German television WDR Stahlkammer Zürich.

In 2001 Joanna Bruzdowicz was awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta.

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Trio dei Due Mondi by Deon Price

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4 MAY 2019

MARIANNA VON MARTINEZ - AUSTRIA

BORN 4 MAY

Marianna Martines or Marianne von Martinez was an Austrian singer, pianist and composer of the classical period. Her father, Nicolo Martines, grew up there and for a time pursued a career as a soldier. He later changed careers, serving in Vienna as Maestro di Camera (major-domo) at the papal nuncio; that is, the Pope's embassy to the Austrian Empire. For service to the Empire, Marianna's brothers in 1774 acquired a patent of nobility, hence the "von" in the family surname.

Already as a child Martines was good enough to perform before the Imperial court, where according to the Helene Wessely, she "attracted attention with her beautiful voice and her keyboard playing." The adult Marianna was frequently asked to perform before the Empress Maria Theresa.

A number of the works that Martines composed are set for solo voice, and her biographers (Godt, Wessely) conjecture that the first singer of these works was their composer. If so, they constitute further evidence for her ability, as the music shows a "predilection for coloratura passages, leaps over wide intervals and trills indicating that she herself must have been an excellent singer." (Wessely).

Martines wrote a number of secular cantatas and two oratorios to Italian texts. These texts are, naturally enough, the work of her mentor Metastasio. Surviving compositions include four masses, six motets, and three litanies for choir. She wrote in the Italian style, as was typical for the early Classical period in Vienna. Her harpsichord performance practice was compared to the style of C.P.E. Bach. Martines’s compositions were well regarded in her time, and some scholars have suggested that Mozart modeled his 1768 Mass, K. 139, after the "Christe" of Martines’s Mass No. 1 in D major. The Michaelerkirche (St. Michael’s Church, next door to the Martines home), saw a performance of her third mass in 1761. Her fourth mass was completed in 1765.

Though she was an active and highly accomplished performer and composer she never sought an appointed position; it would have been unacceptable for a woman in her social class to seek such employment.

Her last known public appearance was on March 27, 1808, attending a performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation conducted by Salieri, in tribute to the now-elderly composer. She died on 13 December 1812 and was buried in St. Mark’s Cemetery.

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Overture in C major by Marianna von Martines

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GABRIELA MOYSEOWICZ  - POLAND 
BORN 4 MAY

Gabriela Maria Moyseowicz  is a Polish composer and pianist. Gabriela played piano skillfully at the age of three. She was recognized as a musical prodigy at music schools in Gdańsk, Bytom and Gliwice. At the age of 13, Gabriela composed a 25-minute concerto for two pianos. She performed it before a group of respected professors-musicians in Kraków and was instantly admitted to the prestigious Academy of Music in Kraków. The concerto was both classical & romantic in style. The work and a number of superb fugues she composed as school-exercises were the first indicators of the scope of the composer’s talent.

A renowned musical critic in Kraków1 highly praised the first atonal composition of Gabriela - “The Piano Sonata No. 1” (1960). Also, the atonal chamber work “Media Vita” (1961) was met with a warm reaction by both the public and musical critics.

From 1962 Moyseowicz attended composition classes at the Academy of Music in Kraków and the State Conservatory in Katowice, and graduated from the latter in 1967. She was awarded the degree of Master of Arts after submitting her second piano concerto. A stormy discussion resulted, among the local professors, over Gabriela’s dissertation in which she had presented her artistic attitudes.

In 1974 Moyseowicz moved to West Berlin, where she worked for thirty years as an organist and choir director at a Catholic church. She made several recordings of her own music for the German Radio (WDR, NDR). Two CDs with orchestral and piano compositions, respectively, were released. Scores of over twenty of Moyseowicz’s compositions were released by a famed musical editor in Berlin.

Although Moyseowicz has always been at ease with the tonal system, it has not been her main artistic goal to compose tonal music. It should be noted the ideas of the “sclerotic avant-garde of the sixties”2 were never attractive for her. From her teens she searched for her own way and managed to develop an original style that has nothing to do with any “modern” or “fashionable” ideas of the second half of the 20th century. Gabriela’s compositions are thoroughly atonal, but listeners have, very often, an impression to hear the tonal music. It is a secret of Gabriela’s workshop that she is able to extract from the highly complex sound material sequences of ear-friendly modern contemporary classical music. The composer uses instruments with the great respect to their design, destination and limitations, yet she produces extraordinary effects. Her dazzling music is rich in invention and imagination. “Gabriela Moyseowicz is a genial composer whose work merits more attention”6. The opinions like this have been expressed on several occasions by musical professionals and music lovers. The work of Gabriela Moyseowicz has been subjected to analyses by several authors.

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Klaviersonata N.3 by Gabriela Moyseowicz

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18 MARCH 2019

HANNA KULENTY - POLAND    

BORN 18 MARCH 

Hanna Kulenty is a Polish composer of contemporary classical music. Since 1992 she lives both in Warsaw (Poland) and in Arnhem (The Netherlands).

From 1980 to 1986 she studied composition with Włodzimierz Kotoński at the Chopin Music Academy in Warsaw. From 1986 to 1988 she studied composition with Louis Andriessen at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague. She participated in several summer courses in contemporary music composition in Kazimierz and Darmstadt - where she visited lectures by lannis Xenakis, Witold Lutosławski, Thomas Kessler and François Bernard Mâche.

From 1989 she works as a free lance composer, recipient of numerous commissions and scholar-ships. Kulenty has composed 2 opera’s, 12 works for large orchestra and more than 60 other pieces. In 1990 she was guest composer at DAAD in Berlin. In 1999/2000 she was composer-in-residence with Het Gelders Orkest in The Netherlands. She lectured at the Other Minds 10 festival (San Francisco) and at Soundstreams Canada 2005. In that same year she was guest professor at the Conservatory of Zwolle. In 2007 she was guest professor at the ESMuC, Music Academy in Barcelona.

She was a jury member during Munich Biennale in 1995, during the International Gaudeamus Music Week 2002, during the International New Chamber Opera Competition “Orpheus-Luciano Berio 2003-2004”, and in 2005 and 2007 during the International Competition of Contemporary Chamber Music in Cracow.

 
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Music for Roy by Hanna Kulenti 

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LJUBICA MARIC - SERBIA   

BORN 18 MARCH

Ljubica Marić  was a composer from Yugoslavia. She was a pupil of Josip Štolcer-Slavenski. She was known for being inspired by Byzantine Orthodox church music. She was professor at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade and member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

She was described as a genially gifted woman, and her music was promoted by the great supporter of contemporary music, Hermann Scherchen. Her music was performed by the most important chamber ensembles and orchestras, and she was offered by Alois Hába a post of the associate professor at the Department for quartertone music at the Prague State Conservatory. World War II disrupted her international career so she spent most of her life in Belgrade, where she focused on composing more works. She was also engaged in visual arts, wrote philosophical poetry, worked as a professor of Belgrade Music Academy and a member of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Ljubica Marić was the first composer to use Byzantine church music in non-liturgical compositions. She synthesized medieval music with the avant-garde experience of 20th-century music in her work, creating pieces with philosophical lyrics. Her music announced the beginning of postmodernism and minimalism, and she is regarded as a precursor of Arvo Pärt and John Tavener.

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Brankovo kolo by Ljubica Maric

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5 FEBRUARY 2019

GRAŻYNA BACEWICZ - POLAND 

BORN 5 FEBRUARY

Grażyna Bacewicz was a Polish composer and violinist. She is the second Polish female composer to have achieved national and international recognition, the first being Maria Szymanowska in the early 19th century.

Many of her compositions feature the violin. Among them are seven violin concertos, five sonatas for violin with piano, three for violin solo (including an early, unnumbered one from 1929), a Quartet for four violins, seven string quartets, and two piano quintets. Her orchestral works include four numbered symphonies(1945, 1951, 1952, and 1953), a Symphony for Strings (1946), and two early symphonies, now lost.

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Concerto for Violin and Piano by Grażyna Bacewicz

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ZARA LEVINA - UKRAINE
BORN 5 FEBRUARY

Zara Levina graduated with a gold medal from the Odessa Conservatory, where she studied piano under B. Dronseiko-Mironovich. In 1932 she graduated from the Moscow Conservatory having studied piano under F. Blumenfeld and composition under N. Miaskovsky and R. Gliere.

In het young days in Odessa she was overwhelmed by music of Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Prokofiev as well as Beethoven and Schumann. Their influence can be traced throughout all of her works. Her gift was primarily melodical, lyrical and deeply personal. The nucleus of he creative output has been vocal music - namely romances (more than 200) followed by vocal miniatures about children. In the 1930s heroic and passionate monologues have been her natural choice. Light music extended the range of her output in the late 1940s and children's music was always a central concern. A spirit of patriotism is present in her tragic monologues of the war years and in the severe and mournful romances on African poetry that she composed during the 1960s. Her melodies are simple, but their individuality is achieved through fine detail, delicate harmony, supple modulation and varied texture.

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Piano Sonata by Zara Levina

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