Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes (1945), the War Requiem (1962) and the orchestral showpiece The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945).
Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich was a Russian cellist and conductor. In addition to his interpretations and technique, he was well known for both inspiring and commissioning new works, which enlarged the cello repertoire more than any cellist before or since. He inspired and premiered over 100 pieces, forming long-standing friendships and artistic partnerships with composers including Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Henri Dutilleux, Witold Lutosławski, Olivier Messiaen, Luciano Berio, Krzysztof Penderecki, Alfred Schnittke, Norbert Moret, Andreas Makris, Leonard Bernstein, Aram Khachaturian, and Benjamin Britten.
Julian Lloyd Webber is a British solo cellist, conductor and broadcaster, a former principal of Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and the founder of the In Harmony music education programme.
Paul Sacher was a Swiss conductor, patron and billionaire businessman. At the time of his death Sacher was majority shareholder of pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche and was considered the third richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of US$13 billion.
Henri Paul Julien Dutilleux was a French composer of late 20th-century classical music. Among the leading French composers of his time, his work was rooted in the Impressionistic style of Debussy and Ravel, but in an idiosyncratic, individual style. Among his best known works are his early Flute Sonatine and Piano Sonata; concertos for cello, Tout un monde lointain... and violin, L'arbre des songes ; a string quartet known as Ainsi la nuit ; and two symphonies: No. 1 (1951) and No. 2 Le Double (1959).
Heinz Robert Holliger is a Swiss composer, virtuoso oboist, and conductor. Celebrated for his versatility and technique, Holliger is among the most prominent oboists of his generation. His repertoire includes Baroque and Classical pieces, but he has regularly engaged in lesser known pieces of Romantic music, as well as his own compositions. He often performed contemporary works with his wife, the harpist Ursula Holliger. Many composers have written works for him, including Messiaen, Berio, Carter, Henze, Krenek, Lutosławski, Martin, Penderecki, Stockhausen and Yun. A noted composer himself, Hollinger has written works such as the opera Schneewittchen (1998).
Colin Matthews, OBE is an English composer of contemporary classical music. Noted for his large-scale orchestral compositions, Matthews is also a prolific arranger of other composer's music, including works by Berlioz, Britten, Dowland, Mahler, Purcell and Schubert. Other arrangements include orchestrations of all Debussy's 24 Préludes, both books of Debussy's Images, and two movements—Oiseaux tristes and La vallée des cloches—from Ravel's Miroirs. Having received a doctorate from University of Sussex on the works of Mahler, from 1964–1975 Matthews worked with his brother David Matthews and musicologist Deryck Cooke on completing a performance version of Mahler's Tenth Symphony.
Steven Honigberg is an American cellist. He is a member of the National Symphony Orchestra and the Potomac String Quartet. From 1994-2002, Honigberg served as chamber music series director at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, during which time the museum produced forty concerts and issued four CDs. From 1990 to 2009, he was principal cellist and chamber music director of the Edgar M. Bronfman series in Sun Valley, Idaho, where he was featured as soloist with the summer symphony in a variety of concerti. Hongiberg solos frequently; he is also known as a well-reviewed performer from David Ott's premier of Concerto for Two Cellos.
The cello suites by Benjamin Britten are a series of three compositions for solo cello, dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich. The suites were the first original solo instrumental music that Britten wrote for and dedicated to Rostropovich, but Britten had earlier composed a cadenza for Joseph Haydn's Cello Concerto in C major, for Rostropovich, in 1964. Rostropovich gave the first performances of each work, and recorded Suite No. 1 and 2 commercially.
Natalia Grigoryevna Gutman, PAU, is a Russian cellist. She began to study cello at the Moscow Music School with R. Sapozhnikov. She was later admitted to the Moscow Conservatory. She later studied with Mstislav Rostropovich.
Conrad Arthur Beck was a Swiss composer.
The Sacher hexachord is a hexachord notable for its use in a set of twelve compositions created at the invitation of Mstislav Rostropovich for Sacher's seventieth birthday in 1976.
Arnold Whittall is a British musicologist and academic. Whittall's research areas have primarily been centred around the musical analysis of 20th-century music and aspects of the nineteenth-century, such as the music of Richard Wagner. He is Professor Emeritus of Musical Theory and Analysis at King's College London, having worked as Professor there between 1975 and 1996.
The Cello Sonata, Op. 65, is a work by the English composer Benjamin Britten. It was premiered in July 1961 at the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk. The work is in five movements:
- Dialogo. Allegro
- Scherzo-Pizzicato. Allegretto
- Elegia. Lento
- Marcia. Energico
- Moto perpetuo. Presto
The Canticle of the Sun (Sonnengesang) is a composition by Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina written in 1997 and published by Hans Sikorski, it is based on the "Canticle of the Sun" by Saint Francis of Assisi and is dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich for his seventieth birthday. Though the piece features a soloist and an ensemble, Gubaidulina does not consider it a cello concerto.
Sophie Adele Wyss was a Swiss soprano who made her career as a concert singer and broadcaster in the UK. She was noted for her performances of French works, many of them new to Britain, for giving the world premieres of Benjamin Britten's orchestral song cycles Our Hunting Fathers (1936) and Les Illuminations (1940), and for encouraging other composers to set English and French texts. Among those who wrote for her were Lennox Berkeley, Arnold Cooke, Roberto Gerhard, Elizabeth Maconchy, Peter Racine Fricker, Alan Rawsthorne and Mátyás Seiber.
The Poet's Echo is a song cycle composed by Benjamin Britten (1913–76) in August 1965 during a holiday visit to the Soviet Union, in Dilizhan, Armenia. It consists of settings for high voice and piano of six poems by the Russian poet Alexandr Pushkin (1799–1837), in their original language. It was published as his Op. 76.
The Cello Concerto is a composition for solo cello and orchestra by the Scottish composer James MacMillan. It is the second of three interrelated compositions in MacMillan's Easter triptych Triduum commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra. The piece was first performed at the Barbican Centre on October 3, 1996 by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the London Symphony Orchestra under the conductor Colin Davis. The work is dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich.
The Cello Concerto is a composition for cello and orchestra by the composer Andrzej Panufnik. The work was commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra for the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Its world premiere was performed by Rostropovich and the London Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Hugh Wolff on 24 June 1992. The concerto was Panufnik's last completed composition, which was finished just two weeks before his death on 27 October 1991.
Messagesquisse (Message-Sketch) is a 1976 composition for solo cello and six cellos by Pierre Boulez.
