Wilhelm Georg Berger (born 4 December 1929, Rupea; died 8 March 1993, Bucharest) was a Romanian composer, musicologist, violist and conductor. [1]
Berger was born in Rupea, Romania. He learned to play the violin and viola under the instruction of Cecilia Nitulescu-Lupu, Anton Adrian Sarvaş, and Alexandru Rădulescu. He was a violist with the George Enescu Philharmonic Orchestra and was also a member of the Romanian Composer Association string quartet.
Berger had a prolific career as a composer. Among his numerous compositions were 24 symphonies, 21 string quartets, oratories, sonatas, concertos, and organ and mass pieces, a number of which garnered him notable awards. He won the Prince Rainier III Composition Award in Monaco for a violin sonata in 1964, and First Prize in Liège in 1965 for his Sixth String Quartet. One of his violin concertos earned him the First Prize in Brussels in 1966. Several of his works are published by the Romanian record label Electrecord, such as his Tenth Symphony.
His musicological work consists of, among others, a series of books about the artistic qualities of sonatas, another series about string quartets, a guidebook for concertos and books about classical composition theory.
John Paul Corigliano Jr. is an American composer of contemporary classical music. With over 100 compositions, he has won accolades including a Pulitzer Prize, five Grammy Awards, Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, and an Academy Award.
David Leo Diamond was an American composer of classical music. He is considered one of the preeminent American composers of his generation. Many of his works are tonal or modestly modal. His early compositions are typically triadic, often with widely spaced harmonies, giving them a distinctly American tone, but some of his works are consciously French in style. His later style became more chromatic.
George Rochberg was an American composer of contemporary classical music. Long a serial composer, Rochberg abandoned the practice following the death of his teenage son in 1964; he claimed this compositional technique had proved inadequate to express his grief and had found it empty of expressive intent. By the 1970s, Rochberg's use of tonal passages in his music had provoked controversy among critics and fellow composers. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania until 1983, Rochberg also served as chairman of its music department until 1968. He became the first Annenberg Professor of the Humanities in 1978.
Grażyna Bacewicz Biernacka was a Polish composer and violinist of Lithuanian origin. She is the second Polish female composer to have achieved national and international recognition, the first being Maria Szymanowska in the early 19th century.
James Ehnes, is Canadian concert violinist and violist.
Peter Mennin was a prominent American composer, teacher and administrator. In 1958, he was named Director of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, and in 1962 became President of the Juilliard School, a position he held until his death in 1983. Under his leadership, Juilliard moved from Claremont Avenue to its present location at Lincoln Center. Mennin is responsible for the addition of drama and dance departments at Juilliard. He also started the Master Class Program, and brought many artists to teach including Maria Callas, Pierre Fournier and others.
Vissarion Yakovlevich Shebalin was a Soviet composer.
David Geringas is a Lithuanian cellist and conductor who studied under Mstislav Rostropovich. In 1970 he won the gold medal at the International Tchaikovsky Competition. He also plays the baryton, a rare instrument associated with music of Joseph Haydn.
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Robert Nathaniel Mann was a violinist, composer, conductor, and founding member of the Juilliard String Quartet, as well as a faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music. Mann, the first violinist at Juilliard, served on the school's string quartet for over fifty years until his retirement in 1997.
William Quincy Porter was an American composer and teacher of classical music.
Christian Wilhelm Berger is a Romanian composer, organist, and a lecturer at the Bucharest Academy.
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Krzysztof Meyer is a Polish composer, pianist, and music scholar, formerly dean of the Department of Music Theory (1972–1975) at the State College of Music, and president of the Union of Polish Composers (1985–1989). Meyer was professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne from 1987 to 2008, before his retirement.
Miroslav Miletić (Croatian pronunciation:[mǐrɔlaʋmîlɛitɕ]; was a Croatian composer and a violin and viola player and teacher.
Lucijan Marija Škerjanc was a Slovene composer, music pedagogue, conductor, musician, and writer who was accomplished on and wrote for a number of musical instruments such as the piano, violin and clarinet. His style reflected late romanticism with qualities of expressionism and impressionism in his pieces, often with a hyperbolic artistic temperament, juxtaposing the dark against melodic phrases in his music.
Valentin Gheorghiu was a Romanian classical pianist and composer. He is regarded as a leading Romanian pianist of the twentieth century, focused on both piano concertos of the Romantic period and chamber music. He won the prize for the best performance of Enescu's Violin Sonata No. 3 at the first George Enescu International Competition in 1958, with his brother Ștefan as the violinist. He made recordings with international orchestras and conductors.
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Emil Bohnke was a German violist, composer and conductor active in Berlin.