Music Critic Geoffrey Norris

Geoffrey Norris is Chief Music Critic of the Daily Telegraph in London, where he is responsible for reviewing a broad spectrum of concerts and recitals in Great Britain and abroad, and for shaping the paper’s serious music coverage.

He became interested in Russian affairs while still at school, and visited Moscow for the first time as a teenager. At the University of Durham his undergraduate dissertation dealt with aspects of music written by the group of 19^th century St Petersburg composes generally known as the «mighty handful», and he went on to pursue research on 18^th-century Russian orchestral music at the Institut Teatra, Muzyki I Kinematografii in Leningrad. Much of this material was channeled into entries for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, published in 1980.

While studying in Leningrad in the early 1970s, he had a chance encounter with Rachmaninoff’s student opera Aleko – seeing it on stage and being given a full score – and in 1973, the centenary of composer’s birth, wrote an article on it for the American journal The Musical Quarterly.

At the same time he looked at the revisions Rachmaninoff made to some of his published scores, and wrote a piece for the British monthly The Musical Times. He was also commissioned to write a biographical and musical study of the composer for the Master Musicians Series, published by J.M. Dent in 1976, translated into Italian in 1992, revised for a second edition in 1993 and now reprinted by Oxford University Press.

He maintains a particular enthusiasm for Rachmaninoff, on whom he has carried out research at the main manuscript repositories in the Library of Congress, the British Library and the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow, as well as studying material at the family’s Russian estate, Ivanovka, and the composer’s Swiss villa, Senar.

He is co-author of A Catalogue of the Compositions of S. Rachmaninoff (London, 1982). In 1993 anniversary year he addressed conferences at the University of Western Ontario and at the Rachmaninoff Music Institute in Tambov, the nearest large town to Ivanovka.

In 1998 he gave a paper on Rachmaninoff’s chamber music to the International Rachmaninoff Festival-Conference at the University of Maryland, and wrote an article on the Second Piano Sonata for the conference’s Proceedings. In 1999 he was adviser to the festival Hidden Perspectives, a major survey of Rachmaninoff’s music given on the South Bank in London.

Aside from his regular contributions to The Daily Telegraph, Geoffrey Norris has written widely on aspects of 18^th-, 19^th- and 20^th-century Russian music; he has lectured in Britain, Russia, Italy, The USA and Canada, and has given broadcasts for the BBC World Service and Radio 3.

From 1975 to 1977 he was Lecturer in Music History at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. He has also served on the juries of piano competitions in Britain, Russia and the Czech Republic, since he shares with the Miami International Piano Festival of Discovery a keen interest in seeking out exceptional young pianistic talent.

from http://miamipianofest.com/lecture/norris.html

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 2312