Maurizio Pollini was an Italian pianist and conductor. He was known for performances of Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and the Second Viennese School, among others. He championed works by contemporary composers, including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, George Benjamin, Roberto Carnevale, Gianluca Cascioli and Bruno Maderna. Several compositions were written for him, including Luigi Nono's ... sofferte onde serene ..., Giacomo Manzoni's Masse: omaggio a Edgard Varèse, and Salvatore Sciarrino's Fifth Sonata. As a conductor he was instrumental in the Rossini revival at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro, conducting La donna del lago from a new critical edition in 1981. He also conducted from the keyboard.
Luigi Nono was an Italian avant-garde composer of classical music.
Sylvano Bussotti was an Italian composer of contemporary classical music, also a painter, set and costume designer, opera director and manager, writer and academic teacher. His compositions employ graphic notation, which has often created special problems of interpretation. He was known as a composer for the stage. His first opera was La Passion selon Sade, premiered in Palermo in 1965. Later operas and ballets were premiered at the Teatro Comunale di Firenze, Teatro Lirico di Milano, Teatro Regio di Torino and Piccola Scala di Milano, among others. He was artistic director of La Fenice in Venice, the Puccini Festival and the music section of the Venice Biennale. He taught internationally, for a decade at the Fiesole School of Music. He is regarded as a leading composer of Italy's avantgarde, and a Renaissance man with many talents who combined the arts expressively.
Electroacoustic music is a genre of popular and Western art music in which composers use technology to manipulate the timbres of acoustic sounds, sometimes by using audio signal processing, such as reverb or harmonizing, on acoustical instruments. It originated around the middle of the 20th century, following the incorporation of electric sound production into compositional practice. The initial developments in electroacoustic music composition to fixed media during the 20th century are associated with the activities of the Groupe de recherches musicales at the ORTF in Paris, the home of musique concrète, the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, where the focus was on the composition of elektronische Musik, and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City, where tape music, electronic music, and computer music were all explored. Practical electronic music instruments began to appear in the early 20th century.
Bruno Maderna was an Italian composer, conductor and academic teacher.
Klaus Huber was a Swiss composer and academic based in Basel and Freiburg. Among his students were Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Jarrell, Younghi Pagh-Paan, Toshio Hosokawa, Wolfgang Rihm, and Kaija Saariaho. He received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2009, among other awards.
Al gran sole carico d'amore is an opera with music by Luigi Nono, based mainly on plays by Bertolt Brecht, but also incorporating texts of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin. Nono himself and Yuri Lyubimov wrote the libretto. It premiered at the Teatro alla Scala on 4 April 1975, conducted by Claudio Abbado. Lyubimov directed the original production. The UK premiere was at the 32nd Edinburgh Festival in 1978. In addition to vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra, the work incorporates taped sounds. This work is a product of Nono's strong political activism through the mid-1970s.
Gioachino Rossini's Petite messe solennelle was written in 1863, possibly at the request of Count Alexis Pillet-Will for his wife Louise, to whom it is dedicated. The composer, who had retired from composing operas more than 30 years before, described it as "the last of my péchés de vieillesse".
Jorge Manuel Marques Peixinho Rosado was a Portuguese composer, pianist and conductor.
Horacio Lavandera is an Argentine pianist, currently residing in Madrid, Spain. As its youngest competitor at the age of sixteen, he won the International Piano Competition Umberto Micheli, held at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatoire and in Teatro alla Scala in Milan. He has been invited to perform as a soloist with prestigious orchestras, as well as to offer recitals in America, Europe, and Asia.
Gianluca Cascioli is an Italian pianist, conductor, and composer.
Bruno Bettinelli was an Italian composer and teacher.
Marcello Abbado was an Italian pianist, composer, conductor and academic teacher. His compositions include several orchestral works, two ballets, numerous pieces for solo piano, and chamber music. As a pianist, he played in major concert halls of the world. He taught composition at several conservatories, ultimately at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory. In 1989 he was awarded the gold medal for Meritorious Culture and Art by the Government of Italy.
Bettina Skrzypczak is a Polish/Swiss composer.
Marco Betta is an Italian composer.
Mauricio Sotelo is a Spanish composer and conductor.
Contrappunto dialettico alla mente is a composition for two-channel magnetic tape by Italian composer Luigi Nono. It was composed in 1968.
... sofferte onde serene ... or ..... sofferte onde serene ..., ALN 42, is a composition for piano and tape by Italian composer Luigi Nono. Borne of Nono's friendship and artistic collaboration with Maurizio Pollini, it was the first of Nono's works in what became his late style.
Rachel Harnisch is a Swiss operatic soprano.
