Virgil Thomson was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music. He has been described as a modernist, a neoromantic, a neoclassicist, and a composer of "an Olympian blend of humanity and detachment" whose "expressive voice was always carefully muted" until his late opera Lord Byron which, in contrast to all his previous work, exhibited an emotional content that rises to "moments of real passion".
Mark-Anthony Turnage is an English composer of contemporary classical music.
Elena Davidovna Kats-Chernin is a Soviet-born Australian composer and pianist, best known for her ballet Wild Swans.
Boris Blacher was a German composer and librettist.
The Suite for Variety Orchestra No. 1 is a suite in eight movements arranged by Levon Atovmyan after 1956, based on music by Dmitri Shostakovich. An editorial error in the tenth volume of the Shostakovich collected works edition published by Muzyka in 1984 resulted in the Suite for Variety Orchestra No. 1 being misidentified as the "Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2" or "Jazz Suite No. 2". The score was first published with the correct name in 2001.
Berthold Goldschmidt was a German Jewish composer who spent most of his life in England. The suppression of his work by Nazi Germany, as well as the disdain with which many modernist critics elsewhere dismissed his "anachronistic" lyricism, stranded the composer in the wilderness for many years before he was given a revival in his final decade.
Lera Auerbach is a Soviet-born Austrian-American classical composer, conductor and concert pianist.
Arthur Leslie Benjamin was an Australian composer, pianist, conductor and teacher. He is best known as the composer of Jamaican Rumba (1938) and of the Storm Clouds Cantata, featured in both versions of the Alfred Hitchcock film The Man who Knew Too Much, in 1934 and 1956.
"The Wild Swans" is a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a princess who rescues her 11 brothers from a spell cast by an evil queen. The tale was first published on 2 October 1838 in Andersen's Fairy Tales Told for Children. New Collection. First Booklet by C. A. Reitzel in Copenhagen, Denmark. It has been adapted to various media including ballet, television, and film.
Alla Yevgenyevna Pavlova is a Russian composer. Pavlova was born and initially raised in Vinnitsa, Ukraine. She and her family moved to Moscow in 1961, and she then moved to Brooklyn, New York in 1990, where she has settled. She is best known for her symphonic work.
Meryl Tankard is an Australian dancer and choreographer who has a wide national and international reputation.
Eliza Aria is an operatic vocalise from the ballet Wild Swans, composed by Elena Kats-Chernin. The piece was first recorded by soprano Jane Sheldon and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, and released on the ABC Classics label.
Wild Swans is a 1991 autobiographical novel by Jung Chang.
Barry Ernest Conyngham,, is an Australian composer and academic. He has over 70 published works and over 30 recordings featuring his compositions, and his works have been premiered or performed in Australia, Japan, North and South America, the United Kingdom and Europe. His output is largely for orchestra, ensemble or dramatic forces. He is an Emeritus Professor of both the University of Wollongong and Southern Cross University. He is former Dean of the Faculty of the Fine Arts and Music at the University of Melbourne.
Matthew Krel was a Russian-Jewish conductor who migrated to Australia and in 1988 founded the SBS Radio and Television Youth Orchestra, of which he was the chief conductor until his death. Like his Soviet friend, the composer Dmitry Kabalevsky, he was passionate about creating quality musical performance ensembles for young people. He was also profoundly influenced by Zoltán Kodály's philosophy.
Anna Clyne is an English composer resident in the USA. She has worked in both acoustic music and electroacoustic music.
Color Music is a suite of five different compositions for orchestra by American composer Michael Torke. The suite is well known for its association with the composer's synesthesia.
Jane Sheldon is a Sydney-born Australian soprano, largely based in New York City. She is an artistic associate at Sydney Chamber Opera.
The "Canon on a Russian Popular Tune" is an orchestral work by Igor Stravinsky composed in 1965. It is the composer's final completed score for orchestra and was composed in the summer of 1965 during work on his Requiem Canticles. Although originally intended as a valedictory tribute to Pierre Monteux, the published score makes no mention of this.
