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Michael Zev Gordon | |
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Born | 1963 (age 60–61) London, England, United Kingdom |
Genres | Classical |
Occupation(s) | Composer |
Michael Zev Gordon (born 1963, London) is a British composer of Jewish descent. [1]
A past oboe player, [2] Gordon studied composition at King's College, Cambridge with Robin Holloway, and subsequently with Oliver Knussen and John Woolrich, and in Italy with Franco Donatoni. He was a composition pupil of Louis Andriessen from 1989 to 1990. [3] His work has often involved a deep engagement with the subject of memory, with the use of quotation of, or allusion to, other music, sometimes explicit, sometimes more buried. He has himself also spoken of his work in terms of 'turbulence seeking serenity'. Stylistically, this could be seen in the relationship between tonal and more dissonant materials in his music.
Key works include the oboe concerto The Fabric of Dreams (2006), premiered by Nicholas Daniel and the Britten Sinfonia, The Impermanence of Things for piano, ensemble and electronics (2009), a London Sinfonietta commission, Allele for 40 voices (2010), a project involving the science of genetics, Bohortha for large orchestra (2012), a BBC Symphony Orchestra commission, Seize the Day (2016), a Birmingham Contemporary Music Group Sound Investment commission, his Violin Concerto (2017), a BBC Symphony Orchestra commission, Touch (1990), a virtuosic piano piece written for the Indonesian virtuoso pianist and composer Ananda Sukarlan and Raising Icarus (2022), a chamber opera for six singers and eight instrumentalists, premiered at the Birmingham Rep.
Gordon was the recipient of the Prix Italia 2004 for his composition for radio A Pebble in the Pond, and two British Composer Awards, for Allele and for This Night for choir and solo cello (2009), a commission for the choir of King's College, Cambridge. He has taught at the universities of Durham, Southampton and at the Royal College of Music. Since 2012 he has been Professor of Composition at the University of Birmingham. His music is published by Wise Music and Composer's Edition. [4]
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Stuart Oliver Knussen was a British composer of contemporary classical music and conductor. Among the most influential British composers of his generation, his relatively few compositions are "rooted in 20th-century modernism, [but] beholden to no school but his own"
Nicholas Daniel is a British oboist and conductor. In 2003 he was appointed Artistic Director of the Leicester International Music Festival.
Sir Lennox Randal Francis Berkeley CBE was an English composer.
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Dame Judith Weir is a British composer serving as Master of the King's Music. Appointed in 2014 by Queen Elizabeth II, Weir is the first woman to hold this office.
Gordon Crosse was an English composer.
Cheryl Ann Frances-Hoad is a British composer.
Roberto Sierra is a Puerto Rican composer of contemporary classical music.
Tansy Davies is an English composer of contemporary classical music. She won the BBC Young Composers' Competition in 1996 and has written works for ensembles such as the London Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. In 2023 she was awarded the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Works Collections at The Ivors Classical Award in recognition of her outstanding achievements in composition. In 2019, she was listed as one of the UK’s most influential people by the Evening Standard’s Progress 1000, alongside Sir Simon Rattle, and Dave.
John Woolrich is an English composer.
Huw Thomas Watkins is a British composer and pianist. Born in South Wales, he studied piano and composition at Chetham's School of Music in Manchester, where he received piano lessons from Peter Lawson. He then went on to read music at King's College, Cambridge, where he studied composition with Robin Holloway and Alexander Goehr, and completed an MMus in composition at the Royal College of Music, where he studied with Julian Anderson. Huw Watkins was awarded the Constant and Kit Lambert Junior Fellowship at the Royal College of Music, where he used to teach composition. He is currently Honorary Research Fellow at the Royal College of Music.
Meurig Bowen is a British arts administrator who works mainly in festival and orchestral programming. Since 2020 he has been Chief Executive and Artistic Director of the Britten Sinfonia.
Dobrinka Tabakova is a Bulgarian-British composer.
Helen Grime is a Scottish composer of contemporary classical music. Her work, Virga, was selected as one of the best ten new classical works of the 2000s by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
Charlotte Bray is a British composer. She was championed by the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, London Sinfonietta and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, BBC Symphony Orchestra. Her music has been performed by many notable conductors such as: Sir Mark Elder, Oliver Knussen, Daniel Harding, and Jac van Steen.
Graham Whettam was an English post-romantic composer.
The Oboe Concerto is a composition for solo oboe and orchestra by the Scottish composer James MacMillan. The work was commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia and was first performed at the Birmingham Town Hall on 15 October 2010 by the oboist Nicholas Daniel and the Britten Sinfonia under MacMillan. The Oboe Concerto piece is dedicated to Nicholas Daniel and the Britten Sinfonia.
Joseph Phibbs is an English composer of orchestral, choral and chamber music. He has also composed for theatre, both in the UK and Japan. Since 1998 he has written regularly to commissions for Festivals, for private sponsors, and for the BBC, which has broadcast premieres of his orchestral and chamber works from the Proms and elsewhere. His works have been given premieres in Europe, the United States and the Far East, and he has received prestigious awards, including most recently a British Composer Award, and a Library of Congress Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation Award. Many of his works have been premiered by leading international musicians, including Dame Evelyn Glennie, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leonard Slatkin, Sakari Oramo, Vasily Petrenko, Gianandrea Noseda, and the Belcea Quartet.
This is a summary of the year 2017 in British music.