J. Sebastian B. Hodges News
Last update
2024-04-24
Refresh
2024-03-19 10:29:00
Venice's Golden Lion: composer Rebecca Saunders receives Lifetime Achievement award from the Biennale Musica
[…] of the sonic material is profoundly speculative and at the same time powerfully empirical and material, tied to the performance and the playing strategies" [from citation]Rebecca Saunders studied composition with Nigel Osborne in Edinburgh and Wolfgang Rihm in Karlsruhe, and in 2019, she became the first woman to receive the Ernst-von-Siemens award. Saunders' piano concerto, To An Utterance was premiered in 2021 by the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra, at the Lucerne Festival with pianist Nicholas Hodges [see my 2020 interview with Nicholas], and she was composer in residence with the Dresdner Philharmonie for 2021/2022.Full details from the Biennale website.
2023-08-07 09:01:02
Nicolas Hodges has carried on with his career as an eminent interpreter of avant-garde music. But it hasn’t been without sacrifices.
2022-03-31 12:31:24
Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, LondonRebecca Saunders’ concerto was the highlight of an opening night that also included Missy Mazzoli and the last major work by George Walker SoundState, the Southbank Centre’s five-day celebration of contemporary composers, is the nearest thing London now has to a new-music festival. Stylistically, its programme is a broad church, and that was reflected in the opening concert, which was given by the London Philharmonic, conducted by Edward Gardner. All four works were being heard for the first time in Britain, though only one of them could really be described as new. That was Rebecca Saunders’ To An Utterance, the piano concerto she composed in 2020 for Nicolas Hodges, who played it here too. Saunders gives the soloist only a few bars rest in the entire 28-minute score, as they are taken on a compelling musical journey. She describes the piano part as an “incessant, compulsive […]
2022-02-03 07:26:55
[…] 1930s. With Strayhorn he composed multiple-extended compositions such as The Nutcracker as well as many short pieces. For a few years at the beginning of Strayhorn's involvement, Ellington's orchestra was widely considered to have reached its peak. Incidentally, it was Strayhorn who penned one of Ellington’s most famous numbers which, in turn, became the band’s signature tune, Take the A Train. Some of the musicians who were members of Ellington's orchestra such as saxophonist Johnny Hodges were hailed among the best players in the jazz idiom. So skilful and charismatic, Ellington moulded his players into one of the most highly regarded orchestral units in the history of jazz. Some members stayed with him for several decades. A master at writing miniatures for the three-minute 78-rpm recording format, Ellington wrote or collaborated on more than one thousand compositions. His extensive body of work is the largest recorded personal jazz legacy in […]
or
- timeline: Composers (Europe).
- Indexes (by alphabetical order): H...