Nicola LeFanu

Last updated

Nicola Frances LeFanu (born 28 April 1947) is a British composer, academic, lecturer and director. [1]

Contents

Life

Nicola LeFanu was born in Wickham Bishops, Essex, England, [2] to William LeFanu and Elizabeth Maconchy (also a composer, later Dame Elizabeth Maconchy). She studied at St Hilda's College, Oxford, before taking up a Harkness Fellowship at Harvard. In 1972 she won the Mendelssohn Scholarship. [3] She later became Director of Music at St Paul's Girls' School (1975–77), taught at King's College London (1977–1995, as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Professor), and was then a Professor of Music at the University of York, where she was Head of Department from 1994 to 2001. She retired from teaching in 2008. [4]

In 1979 she married the composer David Lumsdaine. [5]

She earned a Doctorate in Music from the University of London in 1988 and holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Durham and Aberdeen and from the Open University. She is active in many aspects of the musical profession, as composer, teacher and director. [6]

Works

LeFanu has written around sixty works, including music for orchestra, chamber groups and voices (including four string quartets), and six operas. Her music is published by Chester Novello and Edition Peters. [1]

Opera

Orchestral

Chamber

Recordings

Recordings of four orchestral pieces - The Crimson Bird, The Hidden Landscape, Columbia Falls and Threnody - were issued by NMC in 2020. [9] A collection of her chamber music by Gemini, issued in 2024, includes The Same Day Dawns (1974, for soprano and five instruments), The Moth Ghost (2020 for soprano and piano), the Sextet (1996) and the Piano Trio (2003). [10] Gemini also recorded Invisible Places and Songs Without Words in 2017. [11]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Nyman</span> English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist (born 1944)

Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE is an English composer, pianist, librettist, musicologist, and filmmaker. He is known for numerous film scores, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano. He has written a number of operas, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; Letters, Riddles and Writs; Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs; Facing Goya; Man and Boy: Dada; Love Counts; and Sparkie: Cage and Beyond. He has written six concerti, five string quartets, and many other chamber works, many for his Michael Nyman Band. He is also a performing pianist. Nyman prefers to write opera over other forms of music.

Wilfrid Howard Mellers was an English music critic, musicologist and composer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Maconchy</span> Irish-English composer

Dame Elizabeth Violet Maconchy LeFanu was an Irish-English composer. She is considered to be one of the finest composers Great Britain and Ireland have produced.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Giles Swayne</span> British composer

Giles Oliver Cairnes Swayne is a British composer.

Robert Saxton is a British composer.

Philip Cashian is an English composer. He is the head of composition at the Royal Academy of Music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gerald Barry (composer)</span> Irish composer

Gerald Barry is an Irish composer.

Anthony Gilbert was a British composer and academic, long associated with the Royal Northern College of Music. He also taught for extended periods as head of composition at the New South Wales State Conservatorium. His works, many of them for larger chamber ensembles, were published by Schott and University of York Music Press. Several of them were written for particular musicians, who performed and recorded them. He wrote a memoir, published in 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donnacha Dennehy</span> Irish composer

Donnacha Dennehy is an Irish composer and leader of the Crash Ensemble specializing in contemporary classical music. According to musicologist Bob Gilmore, Dennehy's "high profile of his compositions internationally, together with his work as artistic director of Dublin’s Crash Ensemble, has distinguished him as one of the best-known voices of his generation of Irish composers".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simon Holt</span> English composer

Simon Holt is an English composer.

Brian Elias is a British composer.

David Newton Lumsdaine was an Australian composer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Xavier Rodriguez</span> American classical composer (born 1946)

Robert Xavier Rodríguez is an American classical composer, best known for his eight operas and his works for children.

John Musto is an American composer and pianist. As a composer, he is active in opera, orchestral and chamber music, song, vocal ensemble, and solo piano works. As a pianist, he performs frequently as a soloist, alone and with orchestra, as a chamber musician, and with singers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Johanna Doderer</span> Austrian composer (born 1969)

Johanna Doderer is an Austrian composer.

Odaline de la Martinez is a Cuban-American composer and conductor, currently residing in the UK. She is the artistic director of Lontano, a London-based contemporary music ensemble which she co-founded in 1976 with New Zealander flautist Ingrid Culliford, and was the first woman to conduct at the BBC Promenade Concerts in 1984. As well as frequent appearances as a guest conductor with leading orchestras throughout Great Britain, including all the BBC orchestras, she has conducted several leading ensembles around the world, including the Ensemble 2e2m in Paris; the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra; the Australian Youth Orchestra; the OFUNAM and the Camerata of the Americas in Mexico; and the Vancouver Chamber Orchestra. She is also known as a broadcaster for BBC Radio and Television and has recorded extensively for several labels.

Carin Bartosch Edström is a Swedish composer and author, and is especially interested in opera.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julian Philips</span> British composer (born 1969)

Julian Philips is a British composer. Philips' works have been performed at major music festivals, including The Proms, Tanglewood, Three Choirs Festival, at the Wigmore Hall, South Bank Centre and Berlin Philharmonic Chamber Music Hall and by international artists such as Gerald Finley, Dawn Upshaw, Sir Thomas Allen, the Vertavo String Quartet, the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra, the BBC orchestras and the Aurora Orchestra.

References

  1. 1 2 Sophie Fuller. 'LeFanu, Nicola (Frances)', in Grove Music Online (2001)
  2. "Elizabeth Maconchy DBE". www.musicweb-international.com. Retrieved 4 March 2015.
  3. Europa Publications, ed. (1993). International Who's Who in Classical Music (19 ed.). Routledge. ISBN   978-1-85743-174-2.
  4. ‘LeFANU, Prof. Nicola Frances’, Who's Who 2013, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 2013; online edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 2012; online edn, Nov 2012, accessed 24 Dec 2012
  5. University of York Department of Music "LeFanu archive". music.york.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 10 February 2008. Retrieved 15 August 2015.
  6. Additional biographical details from programme note to Purcell Room concert 1 March 2007
  7. Purcell Room programme note 1 Mar 2007
  8. Purcell Room programme note for the concert on 1 March 2007, the first public performance of the Songs; they had first been sung (in private) at Jane's 70th birthday party. Jane Darwin is the mother of novelist Emma Darwin and soprano Carola Darwin, who sang Songs for Jane on both occasions.
  9. Nicola LeFanu: The Crimson Bird , NMC D255 (2020).
  10. The Path Above the Dunes: Chamber music by Nicola LeFanu , Divine Art MEX 77112 (2024)
  11. Mandala 3, Gemini Ensemble, MSV 28565 (2017)