Geoffrey Álvarez

Last updated

Geoffrey Alvarez
Geoff2.jpg
Born1961
London
OccupationComposer
conductor
writer
librettist
NationalityBritish
Website
www.fiveseasonsmusic.co.uk/index.htm

Geoffrey Alvarez is a British/Nicaraguan composer and conductor. He chairs the annual international composition competition run by the Alvarez Chamber Orchestra. [1] He is also a writer on music and inventor of Gravesian Analysis. [2]

Contents

Education and work

Alvarez studied composition privately with Giles Swayne, then with Paul Patterson at the Royal Academy of Music as a Leverhulme scholar, and later at the University of York with David Blake and Richard Orton, where he obtained a D.Phil.

Some of his papers are published in Gravesiana: The Journal of the Robert Graves Society, whilst he has contributed several articles for Tempo on the work of composers such as Michael Finnissy [3] and Alexander Goehr's Arianna. [4] His own work (his setting of Psalm XXIII in Hebrew) was reviewed in the same publication by Mark R. Taylor. [5]

His compositions range from the wind quintet The Travelling Musicians, performed by the Harlequin Wind Quintet in the Purcell Room in 2001 to seven symphonies and numerous operas including a collaboration with poet Ruth Fainlight commissioned by the Garden Venture of the Royal Opera House: The European Story. [6]

In November 2006, Geoffrey Alvarez returned from Poland as a prize-winning finalist and soloist with the Arthur Rubenstein Łódź Philharmonic Orchestra in the Final of the Tansman 6th International Competition of Musical Personalities, Composers Competition, Łódź 2006 [7]

Selected works

Music

Awards and honours

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References

  1. "Musique sans Frontiers Composition Competition". Archived from the original on 23 November 2017. Retrieved 24 July 2015.
  2. "Geoffrey Alvarez (1999). The Five Seasons: Graves's Goddess Sings. Gravesiana, Vol 2, No 2. 165-176" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 24 July 2015.
  3. Tempo, no. 205 (July 1998), p 25, Cambridge University Press
  4. Tempo, no. 208 (April 1999), p 52, Cambridge University Press
  5. Tempo, no. 217 (July 2001), p 53, Cambridge University Press
  6. Fainlight R. Selected Poems. Sinclair-Stevenson: London 1995
  7. "Interview with David Bruce on Composition Today" . Retrieved 24 July 2015.