19 JULY 2019

EVELYN GLENNIE - SCOTLAND
BORN 19 JULY

Dame Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie is the first person in history to successfully create and sustain a full-time career as a solo percussionist, performing worldwide with the greatest orchestras, conductors and artists. She fondly recalls having played the first percussion concerto in the history of The Proms at the Albert Hall in 1992, which paved the way for orchestras around the world to feature percussion concerti. She had the honour of a leading role in the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Evelyn regularly provides masterclasses and consultations designed to guide the next generation. She is also a leading commissioner of over 200 new pieces for solo percussion for many of the world’s most eminent composers. The film ‘Touch the Sound’ and her enlightening TED speech remain key testimonies to her approach to sound-creation.

Evelyn was awarded an OBE in 1993 and now has nearly 100 international awards to date, including the Polar Music Prize and the Companion of Honour. Evelyn continues to inspire and motivate people from all walks of life. Her masterclasses and consultations are designed to guide the next generation.

Evelyn is currently embarking on the formation of the Evelyn Glennie Archive Collection. The vision is to open a centre that embodies her mission to Teach the World to Listen. She aims to ‘improve communication and social cohesion by encouraging everyone to discover new ways of listening. We want to inspire, to create, to engage and to empower’.

♫ LISTEN

➺ Evelyn Glennie's Website

PEGGY STUART-COOLIDGE - USA

BORN 19 JULY

Peggy Stuart-Coolidge began her career as a concert pianist, but turned to composition when a student at the New England Conservatory. Though her early works are for piano, most of her compositions are for orchestra, including many tone poems, works for piano and orchestra, ballets, and incidental music.

Stuart Coolidge was one of the first American women to have an album devoted to her symphonic works, which were internationally recognized during her lifetime. In fact, many of her works were first premiered in Europe.

An active conductor as well as composer, Stuart Coolidge led an all-woman ensemble in Boston, was pianist and assistant conductor of the Women’s Symphony of Boston. She also founded the Boston Junior League Orchestra.

Though a prolific, acclaimed, often commissioned, and internationally recognized composer, her symphonic works are rarely performed and few recordings exist, or are readily available. We were delighted that the Boston Landmarks Orchestra recently performed one of her works, supported by a WPA Performance Grant, and hope to see more of her pieces in concert halls as more ensembles make an effort to include diverse programming. Her papers and manuscripts are held at Harvard University.

♫ LISTEN

New Englad Autumn by Peggy Stuart Coolidge

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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 

20 MAY 2019

HELEN HOPEKIRK - SCOTLAND 

BORN 20 MAY

Helen Hopekirk was a Scottish pianist and composer who lived and worked in Boston.

Helen Hopekirk was born near Edinburgh, Scotland, a daughter of music shop owners Adam and Helen (née Croall) Hopekirk. She studied music with George Lichtenstein and Scottish composer Alexander Mackenzie, and made her debut as a soloist in 1874 with the Edinburgh Amateur Orchestral Society. After other successful performances and the death of her father, she relocated to study composition with Carl Reinecke in Leipzig. After successful debuts in Leipzig and London, she began regular concert tours of Europe.

In 1882 Hopekirk married Edinburgh merchant and music critic William A. Wilson (d. 1926), who began serving as her manager. She made her American debut in 1883 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and commenced concert tours in the United States. She planned to continue her studies with Franz Liszt, but after his death studied instead with Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna and Czech composer Karel Navrátil in Prague. She and her husband lived in Vienna until 1892, and then moved to Paris, where she began to teach piano.

Her husband was injured in a traffic accident, and in 1897 she accepted the invitation of Director George Chadwick to take a teaching position at the New England Conservatory. In 1901 she left the Conservatory and became a private teacher, also continuing her performance career. Hopekirk and her husband became American citizens in 1918. Her last performance was at Steinert Hall, Boston, in 1939.

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Iona Memories I. Wondering by Helen Hoperkirk

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ROSA GURAIEB - MEXICO 

Rosa Guraieb Kuri was a Mexican pianist, music educator and composer of Lebanese ancestry. She composed many works performed in her native country of Mexico; most of her works have been composed for various chamber ensembles.

She began her musical studies at the age of four, and by eighteen had achieved sufficient musical mastery to become a piano teacher; a year later, she continued her studies of piano, theory, and harmony under Michel Cheskinoff at the National Conservatory in Beirut. Kuri Guraieb then did advanced work at the Conservatory of Mexico under Juan Pablo Moncayo and Salvador Ordones Ochoa. Afterwards, she went to the United States where she studied with Professor Simmonds at the Yale University School of Music, returning to Mexico to study advanced composition techniques with Carlos Chavez at the National Conservatory of Mexico. Guraieb Kuri composed chamber, vocal, and piano works which were performed at music forums and festivals throughout Mexico. Some of her works, including her Second String Quartet, Hommage a Gibran (1982), represent her personal perspective on her Lebanese heritage.

♫ LISTEN

Sonata for violin and piano by Rosa Guraieb

1 MAY 2019

MURIEL HERBERT - UK - 

DIED 1 MAY 

Muriel Emily Herbert was a British composer of the early 20th century. Much of Herbert's work is for solo voice and piano, with art song settings of texts by English and Irish poets such as James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick and W.B. Yeats.

Muriel received the Liverpool scholarship and attended the Royal College of Music in London. She studied with Irish composer, Charles Stanford, and when World War I ended she stayed near London, taught at Wycombe Abbey School for girls, gave private lessons, and performed recitals, and continued developing her musical abilities.

In the early Twenties she met Roger Quilter, who viewed her works favourably and recommended them to the publisher Augener, even signing the contract as a witness. In 1923, Augener published the songs 'Beauty', 'Cradle Song', 'Loveliest of Trees', 'Renouncement' and 'When Death to Either Shall Come'. A further three songs, 'Autumn', 'Most Holy Night' and 'Have you seen but a white lily grow', were published by Augener in 1926. Later, some of Herbert's other art songs and two works for violin and piano ('Giboulée' and 'Enchanted April') were published by Robert Elkin.

Although Muriel Herbert had received an honorary A.R.C.M. by the Royal College and had given occasional broadcasts of her vocal music for the BBC, much of her music has remained rarely performed.

Through the efforts of a former student, Bill Lloyd, and Muriel's daughter Claire Tomalin, her music has begun to be performed and recorded. In 2008, 36 of her art songs for voice and piano were recorded by James Gilchrist, tenor, Ailish Tynan, soprano, and David Owen Norris, piano with Linn Records.

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Renouncement by Muriel Herbert 

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SOPHIA DUSSEK - SCOTLAND 
BORN 1 MAY

Sophia Giustina Dussek was a Scottish singer, pianist, harpist, and composer of Italian descent.

In 1792, Dussek married the composer Jan Ladislav Dussek. Following Jan's death in 1812, Sophia married the violist John Alvis Moralt. The couple lived in Paddington, where she founded a music school.

The opus 2 sonatas were published in at least 3 editions in the 1790s by the Corri-Dussek company in London as by Madame Dussek, and there is no reason to doubt that the 6 sonatas of opus 2, including the famous C minor sonata published and misattributed by Schott as by JL, are anything but the work of Sophia. Paris editions of opus 2 published by Pleyel only bear the name Dussek, leading Zabaleta to his misattribution, but nobody actually claimed opus 2 as the work of JL rather than Dussek before the mid-20th century.

Sophia Dussek was born into the Corri family. She studied voice with her father, composer, music publisher, and impresario Domenico Corri. Her uncle was composer Natale Corri and her cousin was soprano Fanny Corri-Paltoni. Her father provided Sophia with vocal instruction and had her performing from a young age. She was well known as a soprano and composer of songs.

After moving to London in 1788, she studied with Luigi Marchesi and Giovanni Battista Cimador. Dussek was a highly accomplished performer and she had her London debut at the prestigious Salomon concerts in 1791 with Haydn directing from the harpsichord, and afterwards sang quite a bit of the series, taking part in the first performance of Haydn’s The Storm.

She also played a big role in the introduction of Mozart's music to London. She was a soloist in the London premiere of the Requiem, given at John Ashley's Lenten Oratorios, Covent Garden, on 20 February 1801. In 1792 she married Jan Ladislav Dussek. She had been performing, singing and playing the piano and harp with him for some time before that. Their daughter, Olivia, was also a pianist, harpist, and composer.

After Jan Ladislav's death in 1812 Sophia married the viola player John Alvis Moralt. They lived in Paddington, where she established a music school. She published sonatas, rondos, variations, and numerous arrangements for the piano or harp. 

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Sonata for Harp in C minor by Sophia Dussek

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