Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra

Part, Arvo

tso_admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:18:35 +0000

Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b 1935) has forged one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music. He has long held an interest in plainchant and the music of J S Bach, influences which are played out in his own compositions in a number of ways including a preference for austere and hypnotic rhythmic and melodic lines (the plainchant influence), and polyphonic textures and sacred genres (the Bach influence). His music entered a new and idiosyncratic phase in the mid-1970s with the unveiling of his ‘tintinnabuli technique’ (his term), a system of pitch organisation whereby a single melodic line hovering around a central pitch is ornamented by a second part which sounds notes from the tonic triad. In the words of Alex Ross, ‘He [Pärt] is a composer who speaks in hauntingly clear, familiar tones, yet he does not duplicate the music of the past.’ Pärt’s best known works include Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, Tabula Rasa and St John Passion. He has composed a significant quantity of sacred choral music including works which set Latin, Russian Orthodox and Church Slavonic texts. He left Estonia for Western Europe in 1980, living briefly in Vienna before settling in Berlin. He now lives in Tallinn, Estonia.

Langdon, Julian

tso_admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 03:58:39 +0000

Julian Langdon’s music has been performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Orchestra Victoria. In addition to writing for orchestra, he has composed for short films, documentary films, animated films, television productions, video games and commercials. He was a student at the TSO Composers’ School in 2007. In November 2012 the TSO will perform a new, as yet untitled work by Langdon, commissioned for the TSO and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra by Joy Selby Smith, TSO Principal Trumpet Chair Sponsor.

Dvorak, Antonin

tso_admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 01:57:42 +0000

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) probably did more than any other composer to put Czech music on the map in the 19^th century. The son of a butcher and innkeeper, Dvořák rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most successful composers of the day and a celebrated figure on both sides of the Atlantic. A citizen of the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire, Dvořák, a Czech, had to overcome prejudice from the German-speaking élite in his quest to be taken seriously as a composer. He received the welcome support of Johannes Brahms who personally recommended Dvořák to Berlin publisher Fritz Simrock. Simrock made a tidy sum from Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances, a collection of pieces which brought Dvořák to international attention virtually overnight. Dvořák developed a strong following in England – thanks, in large measure, to his choral works – and in the United States where, in the period 1892-95 he was Director and Professor of Composition at the National Conservatory of Music in New York. Dvořák’s ‘American period’ saw the composition of the New World symphony and American string quartet. In addition to nine symphonies, numerous symphonic poems, a truly great cello concerto and plentiful chamber works, Dvořák composed a number of operas, including Rusalka.

Sibelius, Jean

tso_admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 01:36:39 +0000

A conservatory-trained musician, Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) embarked upon violin studies before finding his true metier as a composer. Although he was brought up in a Swedish-speaking household, Sibelius became deeply sympathetic to the Finnish nationalist cause, a fact reflected in works such as Karelia and Finlandia. More than any other figure he put Finland on the map, musically speaking. His violin concerto is one of the greatest works of its type and his seven symphonies – which date from 1899 to 1924 – hold an important place in the history of the 20^th-century symphony. Sibelius struggled with depression and alcohol dependence for much of his life and experienced a very powerful creative crisis from the early 1930s. Retreating to his log villa at Järvenpää outside Helsinki, he wrote almost nothing in his last 25 years. Oddly enough, this was a time when he enjoyed considerable fame at home and abroad. We know that Sibelius laboured over his Eighth Symphony during this period but no trace of the work survives – he tossed the manuscript into a combustion stove in the mid-1940s and it went up in smoke.

Bizet, Georges

tso_admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:51:58 +0000

In a cruel twist of fate, Georges Bizet (1838-1875) died without ever knowing that Carmen would become one of the great success stories of opera. It premièred at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on 3 March 1875. Three months later Bizet was dead. A musically gifted child, Bizet was nine years of age when he commenced studies at the Paris Conservatoire where he excelled at piano, organ and composition. The Symphony in C dates from this early period. He won the coveted Prix de Rome in 1857 and remained in Italy for three years. Upon his return to Paris he undertook whatever work he could find – composing, arranging, working as a rehearsal pianist and doing the rounds of theatres in search of commissions. He wrote a number of operas (including The Pearl Fishers) but none of them held the stage. He had a breakthrough in 1872 when his suite of incidental music from the play L’arlésienne won widespread popularity and a succès de scandale with Carmen. Of course, Carmen went on to become a huge hit worldwide (it reached both Melbourne and Sydney before the end of the 1870s) and won the admiration of Brahms, Nietzsche, Mahler and countless others.

Dukas, Paul

tso_admin — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:04:10 +0000

For many people the name Paul Dukas (1865-1935) will always be synonymous with the Sorcerer’s Apprentice episode from Walt Disney’s Fantasia in which Mickey Mouse (as the eponymous apprentice) is overwhelmed by an army of brooms and buckets sloshing more and more water in the sorcerer’s den. It’s a catastrophe set to music and a classic sequence from a classic film. Premièred in 1897, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was an immediate success and has remained Dukas’ most famous work. Like every other aspiring French composer of his time, Dukas was drawn to writing music for the theatre. The opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue and ballet La Péri are his best known works for the stage. In addition to composing, Dukas was a music critic and an educator. He held positions at the Paris Conservatoire and the École Normale de Musique de Paris where his pupils included Olivier Messiaen, Maurice Duruflé and Jean Langlais.

Ford, Andrew

tso_admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 05:27:02 +0000

A Liverpudlian by birth, composer, writer and broadcaster Andrew Ford (b 1957) has been based in Australia since 1983. His works include the music theatre piece Night and Dreams: the Death of Sigmund Freud, the opera Rembrandt’s Wife (which won the 2009 Green Room Award for ‘Best New Australian Opera’) and the song cycle Learning to Howl. He was composer-in-residence with the Australian Chamber Orchestra 1992-94 and, more recently, with the Australian National Academy of Music. He has received commissions from the Sydney Symphony, Sydney International Piano Competition and Victorian Opera. Additionally, his music has been performed by the New Juilliard Ensemble, Brodsky Quartet and London Sinfonietta. In 2010 and 2011 he was a tutor at the TSO’s Composers’ School. His books include Illegal Harmonies, In Defence of Classical Music and The Sound of Pictures. Every week he reaches a wide audience through The Music Show, his Saturday morning program on ABC Radio National.

Ligeti, Gyorgy

tso_admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 04:36:34 +0000

Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923-2006) is probably best known for his opera Le Grande Macabre (1977) which received its Australian première at the 2010 Adelaide Festival. That said, millions have heard excerpts from his orchestral work Atmosphères (1961) and the Requiem (1965) thanks to their use in Stanley Kubrick’s landmark film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The dense clusters of micropolyphony heard in these excerpts typify much of Ligeti’s music of the 1950s and 1960s. Ligeti crossed the Iron Curtain in 1956 (hidden in a mail train) to take advantage of the freer cultural policies of the West, settling first in Vienna and later in Hamburg. His career reached a high point with the première of Le Grande Macabre in Stockholm in 1978. Works from the last decades of his life include concertos for cello, piano and horn and a large series of Études for solo piano, considered to be among the most dazzling piano music of the second half of the 20^th century.

Edwards, Ross

tso_admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 02:05:21 +0000

Few contemporary Australian composers have contributed as strongly to the concerto repertory as Ross Edwards (b 1943). In addition to a Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto (Maninyas), Oboe Concerto (Bird Spirit Dreaming) and Clarinet Concerto, Edwards has composed a Guitar Concerto (Arafura Dances) and a Shakuhachi Concerto (The Heart of Night), and a Saxophone Concerto (Full Moon Dances) will be premièred this year. Additionally, he has composed symphonies, choral music, chamber music, ballets and a chamber opera, Christina’s World. A former student of Richard Meale and assistant to Peter Sculthorpe, Edwards has forged a distinctly personal style, one that draws upon the sounds and rhythms of the natural world and the diverse music of Australia and the Pacific region. White Ghost Dancing, a CD of Edwards’ music, forms part of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra’s Australian Composer Series on ABC Classics. In addition to the title work, White Ghost Dancing includes the string octet Veni creator spiritus (Come, O Creator Spirit), Mountain Village in a Clearing Mist (an important early work which displays the influence of Asian music) and the Concerto for Guitar and Strings (Arafura Dances), played by guitar virtuoso Karin Schaupp.

Vaughan Williams, Ralph

tso_admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:29:27 +0000

Like Beethoven, Bruckner and Dvořák, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) belongs to the ‘ninth club’, the small coterie of 19^th- and 20^th-century composers who have clocked up nine symphonies. Indeed, Vaughan Williams composed five of his nine symphonies in the last 15 years of his life. Like Mahler, he was not averse to including voices in his symphonies – two of them, A Sea Symphony (Symphony No 1) and Sinfonia antarctica (Symphony No 7) include chorus and vocal soloist(s). But today Vaughan Williams is less remembered for his symphonies than for his single movement works for orchestra (such as The Lark Ascending and Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis), the song Linden Lea and song cycle On Wenlock Edge. As these titles indicate, he had a strong interest in English folk music and English music of the 16^th century. Vaughan Williams studied briefly with Max Bruch and Maurice Ravel and was himself a notable teacher, holding the position of professor of composition at London’s Royal College of Music between 1919 and 1939.