Geoffrey Douglas Madge (born 3 October 1941) is an Australian classical pianist and composer. [1]
Madge was born in Adelaide and took his first piano lessons at the age of eight. He later won the 1963 ABC Concerto and Vocal Competition. After winning this competition he left for Europe in 1963 and settled in the Netherlands. He was appointed professor of piano at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.
Madge is known for performing long and arduous works. He was the first to record Leopold Godowsky's Studies on Chopin's Études , once described as "the most impossibly difficult things ever written for the piano". He has given six complete performances of Sorabji's Opus clavicembalisticum , [2] one of the longest and most difficult works ever written for the piano. In 1982, 52 years after Sorabji premiered the work, Madge gave the work its second public performance. Two of Madge's performances of the work have been released commercially. [3]
In 1979, he gave the first complete performance of Nikos Skalkottas's 32 Piano Pieces. [4]
Nikos Skalkottas was a Greek composer of 20th-century classical music. A member of the Second Viennese School, he drew his influences from both the classical repertoire and the Greek tradition. He also produced a sizeable amount of tonal music in the last phase of his musical creativity.
Nikolai Karlovich Medtner was a Russian composer and pianist. After a period of comparative obscurity in the 25 years immediately after his death, he is now becoming recognized as one of the most significant Russian composers for the piano.
Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was an English composer, music critic, pianist and writer whose music, written over a period of seventy years, ranges from sets of miniatures to works lasting several hours. One of the most prolific 20th-century composers, he is best known for his piano pieces, notably nocturnes such as Gulistān and Villa Tasca, and large-scale, technically intricate compositions, which include seven symphonies for piano solo, four toccatas, Sequentia cyclica and 100 Transcendental Studies. He felt alienated from English society by reason of his homosexuality and mixed ancestry, and had a lifelong tendency to seclusion.
Lowell Liebermann is an American composer, pianist and conductor.
John Andrew Howard Ogdon was an English pianist and composer.
Opus clavicembalisticum is a work for solo piano, notable for its length and difficulty, composed by Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji and completed on 25 June 1930.
İdil Biret is a Turkish concert pianist.
Jonathan Powell is a British pianist and self-taught composer.
Geoffrey Peter Bede Hawkshaw Tozer was an Australian classical pianist and composer. A child prodigy, he composed an opera at the age of eight and became the youngest recipient of a Churchill Fellowship award at 13. His career included tours of Europe, America, Australia and China, where he performed the Yellow River Concerto to an estimated audience of 80 million people. Tozer had more than 100 concertos in his repertoire, including those of Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Medtner, Rachmaninoff, Bartók, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Gerhard.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 3 in E-flat major was at first conceived by him as a symphony in the same key. But he abandoned that idea, jetisoned all but the planned first movement, and reworked this in 1893 as a one-movement Allegro brillante for piano and orchestra. His last completed work, it was duly published as Opus 75 the next year, after he died, but given by publisher Jurgenson the title "Concerto No. 3 pour Piano avec accompagnement d'Orchestre".
Erik William Chisholm was a Scottish composer, pianist, organist and conductor sometimes known as "Scotland's forgotten composer". According to his biographer, Chisholm "was the first composer to absorb Celtic idioms into his music in form as well as content, his achievement paralleling that of Bartók in its depth of understanding and its daring", which led some to give him the nickname "MacBartók". As composer, performer and impresario, he played an important role in the musical life of Glasgow between the two World Wars and was a founder of the Celtic Ballet and, together with Margaret Morris, created the first full-length Scottish ballet, The Forsaken Mermaid. After World War II he was Professor and Head of the South African College of Music at the University of Cape Town for 19 years until his death. Chisholm founded the South African College of Music opera company in Cape Town and was a vital force in bringing new operas to Scotland, England and South Africa. By the time of his death in 1965, he had composed over a hundred works.
Jonathan "Yonty" Solomon was a South African pianist. He played with many of the world's best-known orchestras.
The Concert Allegro, Op. 46 by Sir Edward Elgar is a piece of music for solo piano. It takes about 10 minutes to perform. It is the only piano work he wrote that was designed for concert performance. It is in the key of C major and was written in 1901, at the request of the pianist Fanny Davies.
John Ralph Alexander Giles (Alex) Abercrombie was a British pianist, composer, and mathematician.
A piano symphony is a piece for solo piano in one or more movements. It is a symphonic genre by virtue of imitating orchestral tone colour, texture, and symphonic development.
Gordon Charles Watson AM was an Australian classical pianist and teacher. He taught at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music from 1964 to 1986, retiring as Head of the Keyboard Department.
Alistair Richard Hinton is a Scottish composer and musicologist with a focus on the works of his friend Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji. He is the curator of the Sorabji Archive.
Sequentia cyclica super "Dies irae" ex Missa pro defunctis, commonly known as Sequentia cyclica, is a piano composition by Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji. Written between 1948 and 1949, it is a set of 27 variations on the medieval sequence Dies irae and is widely considered one of Sorabji's greatest works. With a duration of about eight hours, it is one of the longest piano pieces of all time.
"Gulistān"—Nocturne for Piano, commonly known as Gulistan, is a piano piece by Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji written in 1940. Its title refers to Golestan, a collection of poems and stories by 13th-century Persian poet and writer Sa'di. The piece lasts about 30 minutes in performance and is often considered one of Sorabji's greatest works.