Composers: May 2008 Archives

Unknown Mozart's compositions in Poland?

Experts from famous Mazarteum in Salzburg in Austria will probably examine wheather compositions, which were found in musical collection in Jasna Góra, signed by Wolfgang Amadeusz Mozart, are really the famous composer works of art. On 24^th April Polish Press Agency (Polska Agencja Prasowa) informed that in collection in Jasna Góra, unknown Mozart's compositions may be found. On 2^th May, during International Festival of Sacred Music "Gaude Mater" (Miedzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Sakralnej) in Czestochowa, one of the composition, an aria, was peformed.

Read more about this at the New Poland website:

   http://news.poland.com/result/news/id/442

Vänskä sets down the baton and takes up the pen

The famed music conductor makes his second foray into the world of composition with a nine-minute work that reflects the 35W bridge collapse.

By Graydon Royce

Osmo Vänskä, composer, has struck again. The music director of the Minnesota Orchestra has knocked out a new work titled "Bridges" that will have its premiere on Sunday with the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. The nine-minute piece was inspired by the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge last summer.

Bill Schrickel, principal bass with the Minnesota Orchestra and conductor of the Metropolitan Symphony, had been nagging Vänskä to write something since 2006, when the Minnesota Orchestra performed his composition "Here!...Beyond?"

Read more about this at the Star Tribune website:

   http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/music/18976034.html

Lend Me a Pick Ax: The Slow Dismantling of the Compositional Gender Divide

By Lisa Hirsch

In the world of classical music, as elsewhere, women have made tremendous progress over the last 30 years. Following the introduction of blind auditions in the 1970s, which greatly reduce bias, women now make up about half of the string and woodwind players in American orchestras. Women occupy prominent administrative positions in major musical institutions. Women direct and design productions at important opera houses.

Women also make up about 30 percent of composition students in American colleges and conservatories. While this is a vast and positive change, it's still not easy for women to get their works performed, especially by symphony orchestras. During the 2004-05 concert season, works by women accounted for only one percent of all pieces performed by the 300 or so member orchestras who responded to the repertory survey of the American Symphony Orchestra League (now the League of American Orchestras, or LAO). The following year, with a boost from Joan Tower's widely-performed Made in America, the number rose to two percent.

Read more about this at the NewMusicBox website:

   http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=5576

Vivaldi's long-lost opera returns to Prague after 278 years

After hunting the missing manuscript down in a German archive, Czech conductor revives "Argippo"

By David Randall

A long-lost opera by Antonio Vivaldi was to have its first performance in centuries last night. Argippo, discovered by a Czech musician as he rummaged through an old archive of anonymous scores, was being staged at a castle in Prague, the city where it had its premiere in 1730. Fittingly, it will be conducted by Ondrej Macek, the man who found the manuscript, and played by his Baroque Music Ensemble Hofmusici.

Vivaldi, called by contemporaries "the Red Priest" for the colour of his hair, is known these days, to all but serious lovers of Baroque music, for a single work: The Four Seasons. However, he was a prolific composer who produced more than 500 concertos, 73 sonatas, numerous pieces of sacred music and 46 operas. One of them, Argippo, opened in the Palace of Count Spork in the centre of Prague 278 years ago. The Czech capital was then a city of arts with some of the best music of the time, often performed by the continent's most prominent singers and musicians.

Read more about this at The Independent website:

   http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/820860.html