Deva Dassy (born Marie-Anne Lambert, Paris 26 August 1911, died Mouriès 11 March 2016, was a French mezzo-soprano, active in opera and operetta in France from the 1930s to the 1960s who made many radio and studio recordings.
WIKIPEDIA
VIDEO: Deva-Dassy & Emile Rousseau La plus Belle perle du Monde Die Blume von Hawaii (Fleur d' Hawaii)
Gustav Meier, conductor emeritus of the Greater Bridgeport Symphony, died Friday morning, May 27 2016, at his home in Ann Arbor, Mich., where he had been under hospice care for several weeks. He was 86.
Gustav Meier (1929–2016) was a Swiss-born conductor and director of the Orchestra Conducting
Program at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. He was also Music Director of the Greater Bridgeport Symphony Orchestra in Connecticut, for more than 40 years (1972–2013).
VIDEO: The Greater Bridgeport Symphony rehearses with Gustav Meier conducting at the Klein Memorial Auditorium on March 14, 2013. This will be Meier's final season conducting for the symphony. The musical piece is: Tchaikovsky's "Capriccio Italien, Opus 45."
Atlanta's Dainty Double-Bass Player For 71 Years, Dies Onstage.
Jane Little spent her long life making beautiful music, and she died May 15, 2016 doing just what she loved, onstage. Little played with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra for more than 71 years. She joined the symphony in 1945, when she was just 16.
NPR
NYTimes Obit
Robert W. Gutman, Biographer of Wagner and Mozart, was born in Brooklyn on Sept. 11, 1925, the son of Theodore Gutman, a lawyer, and the former Elsie Edenbaum, a legal secretary and homemaker. As a young man, he studied the piano and took instruction in music theory from Kurt Adler, a longtime conductor of the Metropolitan Opera.
His biographies of Wagner and Mozart helped upend popularly held ideas about both composers’ lives, he died on Friday, May 20, 2016 in the Bronx. He was 90.
Isao Tomita often known simply as Tomita, was a Japanese music composer, regarded as one of the pioneers of electronic music and space music.
In addition to creating note-by-note realizations, Tomita made extensive use of the sound design capabilities of his instrument, using synthesizers to create new sounds to accompany and enhance his electronic realizations of acoustic instruments. He also made effective use of analog music sequencers and the Mellotron and featured futuristic science fiction themes, while laying the foundations for synth-pop music and trance-like rhythms. Many of his albums are electronic versions and adaptations of famous classical music pieces and he received four Grammy Award nominations for his 1974 album Snowflakes Are Dancing. WIKIPEDIA
VIDEO:
Arabesque No. 1 from Isao Tomita's "Snowflakes Are Dancing" LP.
Elsie Jean Morison won the Dame Nellie Melba Scholarship in 1945, and the Queen's Prize at the Royal College of Music in 1947.
Among Morison's many recordings, those of Purcell, Handel and Michael Tippett's A Child of Our Time capture the grace and conviction of her singing. She has also recorded an outstanding and very well received complete Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes, Opp. 52 and 65, with Marjorie Thomas, Richard Lewis and Donald Bell, accompanied by Vitya Vronsky and Victor Babin.
In 1963, she married the Czech conductor Rafael Kubelík, and decided to retire from performing. She did sing occasionally post-retirement, such as at a 1968 concert in Melbourne conducted by her husband, with her mother in the audience.
Morison died in Prague on 5 April 2016, aged 91.
WIKIPEDIA
VIDEO:
From "The Fairy Queen" by Henry Purcell, here is Australian soprano Elsie Morison singing the Act II air under the baton of Anthony Lewis. 1957.
NYTimes Obit
Ursula Mamlok (February 1, 1923 – May 4, 2016) was a German-born American composer and teacher. Mamlok composed extensively for small chamber ensembles of various configurations as well as works for piano. However, her compositional oeuvre included a few pieces for orchestra, including a concerto for oboe. Other works included several songs, as well as works for voice and chamber ensemble. Mamlok's husband, Dwight Mamlok, penned the text for her 1987 song entitled "Der Andreasgarten".
WIKIPEDIA
VIDEO:
Hamed Shadad, clarinet
Kate Goldstein, violin
James Rosamilla, cello
December 12, 2013
Longy School of Music of Bard College
Ursula Mamlok (1923-2016) was born in Berlin and immigrated to Ecuador in 1939 due to Nazi persecution of Jewish citizens. In the same year, she received a scholarship to the Mannes School of Music in New York, where she studied with Roger Sessions, Stefan Wolpe (a student of Anton Webern), and Ralph Shapey. After graduating, she taught composition at New York University and at the Manhattan School of Music for 40 years.
Alan Raymond Loveday, violinist, born 29 February 1928; died 12 April 2016
The violinist Alan Loveday, who has died aged 88, went on from prodigious beginnings in New Zealand to London, and in particular the Academy of St Martin in the Fields (ASMF). As one of the ensemble’s soloists and leaders, he helped create its distinctively brilliant and even string sound.
The ASMF’s founder, Neville Marriner, asked Loveday to be the solo violin in a recording of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (1969); his beautiful, unmannered playing led to sales of half a million copies and the ASMF’s first gold disc. Marriner, a contemporary at the Royal College of Music in London, recalled that Loveday “was better than any of us. I would say that he was the best individual violin player that the RCM has ever produced.”
The Guardian Obit
Dmytro Hnatyuk was a Ukrainian baritone opera singer and a former member of the Ukrainian Parliament.
WIKIPEDIA
He was a singer at the Kiev Opera and Ballet Theatre appearing as a soloist in many songs. In 1979, Hnatyuk graduated from the State Institute and of Theatrical Arts as a Director (rezhyser). From 1951 to 1988, he worked as an opera singer and from 1975 also as a director of the State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet as well working as a trainer of the National Academic Theatre. In 1988, he became the director of the State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet. Hnatyuk sang in many operas by Ukrainian and worldwide composers.
Gabriele Sima was an Austrian opera singer who had an active international performance career since 1979. Particularly known for her appearances at the Salzburg Festival, the Vienna State Opera, and the Zurich Opera, she has performed in roles associated with both the soprano and mezzo-soprano repertoires.
