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Posts from the ‘Composers’ Category

May 2

norwegian woman composer

Agathe Backer-Grøndahl

“…she is a thousand times a finer player than he; and I got quite beside myself at the idea of his presuming to teach her how to play this and that instead of going down on his knees and begging her to deliver him from his occasional vulgarity, and to impart to him some of her Mendelssohnic sense of form in composition…”
G.B. Shaw on Agathe Backer-Grøndahl and Edward Grieg

The musical talent of the norwegian composer Agathe Backer-Grøndahl (1847 – 1907) was early discovered. Aged 17 she left for Berlin against the will of her parents to study the piano. Three years later she made her début in Christiania (now Oslo) with Beethoven’s 5th piano concerto under the baton of an unknown conductor named Edward Grieg. After this, she went on studying with the very best of the times: Franz Liszt and Hans von Bülow personally.

One glance at her music and you can tell she must have been an excellent pianist, and indeed she was hailed, even by G.B. Shaw, to be the “true heiress of Clara Schumann”. In 1875 Backer-Grøndahl was elected member of the Royal  Academy of Music in Sweden. She was of great influence to the nordic music scene, and in my opinion would probably have been better known to us today than Grieg, had she only been a man. She was part of the norwegian suffrage movement, bur kept a low profile in this not to jeopardize her music sales.

There is an excellent essay on Backer-Grøndahl by Camilla Hambro at the very informative site of “The Kapralova Society” here.

Apr 11

Female composer Florence Beatrice Price

Florence B. Price

Florence Price (1887 – 1953) was the first African-American woman composer to earn national recognition.  Her mother was a successful business woman, and her father a politically active author, inventor and the first black dentist of her home town Little Rock, Arkansas.

Price sold her firs composition to a publisher at the age of eleven. Already an accomplished organist and pianist, she later studied composition at the new England Conservatory.

Price’s first symphony in E-minor won first prize in a national competition and was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933.

Price composed over 300 works including another symphony, a piano concerto and numerous songs and chamber music pieces. She is well known for her spirituals arrangements, one of which there is a famous recording with Marian Anderson (My soul’s been anchored in de Lord).

Mar 21

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Lars-Erik Larsson

Lars-Erik Larsson (1908-1986) was born in Åkarp, in south Sweden. He studied in Stockholm and with Alban Berg and Fritz Reuter in Vienna and Leipzig, then worked for the swedish radio and taught at the Stockholm Conservatory as well as at the Uppsala University where he held the position as musical director.

Larssons style is varied, ranging from swedish nationalistic neoclassical style to serial music, a technique which he is said to be the first swedish composer to use.

Here’s a youtube clip of “Romans”, from his in Sweden extremely popular “Pastoralsvit”: I don’t know who plays it and it comes with some kitchy pictures (and some nice ones, too) but it was the only recording I found where the tempo wasn’t too slow for my taste.

Dec 31

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Toivo Ilmari Hannikainen

Ilmari Hannikainen  (1892 – 1955) came from a very famous finnish musical family. His father and two of his brothers were composers and another brother was a conductor. Read more

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