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Harpsichordist
A harpsichordist is a person who plays the harpsichord. Harpsichordists may play as soloists, as accompanists, as chamber musicians, or as members of an orchestra, or some combination of these roles. Solo harpsichordists may play unaccompanied sonatas for harpsichord or concertos accompanied by orchestra. Accompanist harpsichordists might accompany singers or instrumentalists (e.g., a violinist or Baroque flute player), either playing works written for a voice (or an instrument) and harpsichord or an orchestral reduction of the orchestra parts. Chamber musician harpsichordists could play in small groups of instrumentalists, such as a quartet or quintet. Baroque-style orchestras and opera pit orchestras typically have a harpsichordist to play the chords in the basso continuo part. History Many baroque composers played the harpsichord, including Johann Sebastian Bach, Domenico Scarlatti, George Frideric Handel, François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau. At this time, it was commo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gustav Leonhardt
Gustav Maria Leonhardt (30 May 1928 – 16 January 2012) was a Dutch keyboardist, conductor, musicologist, teacher and editor. He was a leading figure in the historically informed performance movement to perform music on period instruments. Leonhardt professionally played many instruments, including the harpsichord, pipe organ, claviorganum (a combination of harpsichord and organ), clavichord, fortepiano, and piano. He also conducted orchestras and choruses. Biography Gustav Leonhardt was born in 's-Graveland, near Hilversum, and studied organ and harpsichord from 1947 to 1950 with Eduard Müller at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel. In 1950, he made his debut as a harpsichordist in Vienna, where he studied musicology. He was professor of harpsichord at the Academy of Music from 1952 to 1955 and at the Amsterdam Conservatory from 1954. He was also a church organist. Career Leonhardt performed and conducted a variety of solo, chamber, orchestral, operatic, and c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Trevor Pinnock
Trevor David Pinnock (born 16 December 1946 in Canterbury, England) is a British harpsichordist and conductor. He is best known for his association with the period-performance orchestra The English Concert, which he helped found and directed from the keyboard for over 30 years in baroque and classical music. He is a former artistic director of Canada's National Arts Centre Orchestra and founded The Classical Band in New York. Since his resignation from The English Concert in 2003, Pinnock has continued his career as a conductor, appearing with major orchestras and opera companies around the world. He has also performed and recorded as a harpsichordist in solo and chamber music and conducted and otherwise trained student groups at conservatoires. Trevor Pinnock won a Gramophone Award for his recording of Bach's ''Brandenburg Concertos'' with the European Brandenburg Ensemble, an occasional orchestra formed to mark his 60th birthday. Biography and career Early life Trevor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Domenico Scarlatti
Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti (26 October 1685 – 23 July 1757) was an Italian composer. He is classified primarily as a Baroque music, Baroque composer chronologically, although his music was influential in the development of the Classical period (music), Classical style. Like his renowned father Alessandro Scarlatti, he composed in a variety of musical forms, although today he is known mainly for List of solo keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, his 555 keyboard sonatas. He spent much of his life in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families. Life and career Scarlatti was born in Naples, Kingdom of Naples, then belonging to the Spanish Empire. He was born in 1685, the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. He was the sixth of ten children of the composer and teacher Alessandro Scarlatti. His older brother Pietro Filippo Scarlatti, Pietro Filippo was also a musician. Scarlatti first studied music under his father. Other composers who ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philip Manuel
Philip Manuel (1893 – October 6, 1959) was an American pianist, organist, harpsichordist and music educator. With pianist, organist and harpsichordist Gavin Williamson, he formed a duo in 1922, known as Manuel and Williamson, that helped promote the use of harpsichords as concert instruments. In the spring of 1935, the duo were the first professionals to play Bach's Concerto for Four Harpsichords, BWV 1065, in the United States on this instrument. Life and career Philip Manuel was of Portuguese and British descent. He began the study of music at a military school with piano teachers who traveled from town to town. He attended Grinnell College in Iowa, where he studied in both the academic and music departments. Following his graduation, he traveled to Vienna to study organ, piano and singing, and then to London. After a time teaching at the University of North Dakota, he moved to Chicago. He served overseas during the War. His was slim, quiet, and scholarly. He wore pince-nez ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Malcolm (musician)
George John Malcolm Commander of the Order of the British Empire, CBE Order of St. Gregory the Great, KSG (28 February 191710 October 1997) was an English pianist, organist, composer, harpsichordist, and conductor. Malcolm's first instrument was the piano, and his first teacher was a nun who recognised his talent and recommended him to the Royal College of Music at the age of seven, where he studied under Kathleen McQuitty FRCM until he was 19. He attended Wimbledon College, and went on to study at Balliol College, Oxford in the 1930s.Obituary The Catholic Herald. Retrieved 22 September 2014. During the Second World War he had a musical role with the RAF becoming a bandleader. After the War he completed his musical studies with Herbert Fryer. He bought a har ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kenneth Gilbert
Kenneth Albert Gilbert (December16, 1931April15, 2020) was a Canadian harpsichordist, organist, musicologist, and music educator. Biography Born in Montreal, Gilbert studied at the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal under Yvonne Hubert (piano) and Gabriel Cusson (harmony and counterpoint). He also studied the organ with Conrad Letendre in Montréal. In 1953 he won the Prix d'Europe for organ performance, an award which enabled him to pursue studies in Paris with Nadia Boulanger (composition), Maurice Duruflé (organ), Ruggero Gerlin (harpsichord), Gaston Litaize (organ), and Sylvie Spicket (harpsichord) from 1953 to 1955. He later studied the harpsichord privately under Wanda Landowska. Gilbert made his first recordings with the Canadian label Baroque Records Co. of Canada Ltd. in 1962 – an all-J. S. Bach program, followed by several more solo harpsichord recordings of music by Bach, another of Rameau, and several chamber music albums with other Canadian ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Igor Kipnis
Igor Kipnis (September 27, 1930January 23, 2002) was a German-born American harpsichordist, pianist and conductor. Biography The son of Metropolitan Opera bass Alexander Kipnis, he was born in Berlin, where his father was singing with the Berlin State Opera. Although Jewish, the elder Kipnis was popular in Germany during Nazism's rise to prominence. Employing the stratagem of a vocal injury, the elder Kipnis fled Germany for Austria. When the Nazis annexed that country, the family was touring Australia. From there they moved to the US in 1938. He learned the piano with his maternal grandfather, Heniot Levy; attended the Westport School of Music, and received his B.A. from Harvard University, where he served as the program director of WHRB, Harvard's undergraduate radio station. He studied harpsichord with Fernando Valenti, and made his concert debut in New York in 1959. He was an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa (Harvard, 1977), and in 1993 he was awarded an honorary Docto ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
François Couperin
François Couperin (; 10 November 1668 – 11 September 1733) was a French Baroque music, Baroque composer, organist and harpsichordist. He was known as ''Couperin le Grand'' ("Couperin the Great") to distinguish him from other members of the musically talented Couperin family. Life Couperin was born in Paris, into a prominent musical family. His father Charles was organist at the Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais, Church of Saint-Gervais in the city, a position previously held by Charles's brother Louis Couperin, the esteemed keyboard virtuoso and composer whose career was cut short by an early death. As a boy François must have received his first music lessons from his father, but Charles died in 1679 leaving the position at Saint-Gervais to his son, a common practice known as ''survivance'' that few churches ignored. With their hands tied, the churchwardens at Saint-Gervais hired Michel Richard Delalande to serve as new organist on the understanding that François would replace him ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gavin Williamson (harpsichordist)
Gavin Williamson (Winnipeg, 1897 - Chicago, 1989) was an American pianist, harpsichordist, organist and music educator. With pianist Philip Manuel, he formed a duo in 1922 that helped promote the professional use of harpsichords in the United States. Life and career Gavin Williamson was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He studied music at the University of Chicago and was a Fellow of Oxford University studying with Artur Schnabel, Ethel Leginska and Theodor Leschetizky. At the University of Chicago, Williamson met Philip Manuel (1893–1959) and the two developed an interest in harpsichord as a concert instrument. At this time in the 1920s, there were fewer than 50 harpsichords in the United States, most located in museums. The two men went to Paris in search of a builder, where they contracted with Pleyel et Cie to produce two instruments for their use. With these instruments, they initiated concert tours of the United States, and also worked as teachers of harpsichord, piano and v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wanda Landowska
Wanda Aleksandra Landowska (5 July 1879 – 16 August 1959) was a Polish harpsichordist and pianist whose performances, teaching, writings and especially her many recordings played a large role in reviving the popularity of the harpsichord in the early 20th century. She was the first person to record Johann Sebastian Bach's ''Goldberg Variations'' on the harpsichord in 1933. She became a naturalized French citizen in 1938. Life and career Life in Europe Landowska was born in Warsaw to Jewish parents. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother was a linguist who translated Mark Twain into Polish. She began playing piano at the age of four, and studied at the Warsaw Conservatory with the senior Jan Kleczyński and Aleksander Michałowski. She was considered a child prodigy.Kottick, Edward L. ''A History of the Harpsichord, Volume 1''. Indiana University Press, 2003. pg. 425 She studied composition and counterpoint under Heinrich Urban in Berlin, and had lessons in Paris with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scott Ross (harpsichordist)
Ross in 1985 Scott Ross (March 1, 1951 – June 13, 1989) was a United States-born harpsichordist who lived in France and Canada for many years. His recordings include the first complete recording by a single performer of the 555 harpsichord sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. Biography Scott Stonebreaker Ross was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to newspaper journalist James Ross and Sarah Madeline Howe. He was nearly crippled by a severe scoliosis that kept him in a corset for much of his early life. He studied piano and organ in Pittsburgh. Following the death of his father, he moved to France with his mother in 1964. His mother and brother soon returned to the US, but Scott remained in the country, living independently from the age of 13. He studied harpsichord at the Conservatoire de Nice, and during this period he was invited by Simone Demangel, the owner of the chateau in the village of Assas, near Montpellier, to give harpsichord lessons as a live-in tutor. After compl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ralph Kirkpatrick
Ralph Leonard Kirkpatrick (; June 10, 1911April 13, 1984) was an American harpsichordist and musicologist, widely known for his chronological catalog of Domenico Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas as well as for his performances and recordings. Life and work Kirkpatrick was born in Leominster, Massachusetts in 1911 and began studying piano at a young age. He continued his piano studies in Cambridge while studying art history at Harvard University. He became interested in the harpsichord at Harvard and gave his first harpsichord recital there in 1930. After graduating in 1931, he traveled to Europe on a John Knowles Paine Fellowship. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and harpsichord revival pioneer Wanda Landowska in Paris, with Arnold Dolmetsch in Haslemere, Heinz Tiessen in Berlin, and Günther Ramin in Leipzig. In January 1933 he made his European debut in Berlin performing Johann Sebastian Bach's '' Goldberg Variations''. In 1933 he also performed several concerts in Italy, includ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
