John Corigliano

One of America’s finest and most widely recognized composers, John Corigliano has won several Grammy Awards, the Pulitzer Prize and dozens of other honours.

His hauntingly beautiful Chaconne and virtuosic The Red Violin Caprices, both based on his Academy Award winning film score for The Red Violin, attest to his maverick imagination, while a famous passage from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is the seed from which Fantasia on an Ostinato grew.

The Violin Sonata, one of Corigliano’s earliest works, combines sophistication and vigor.

A graduate of the Juilliard School New York and the Music Academie of Cologne, Ida Bieler received top honours and the Heimsuth Award. Four great instrumentalists guided her musical development: Ruggiero Ricci and Oscar Shumsky in USA ; Max Rostal and Nathan Milstein in Europe .

“Corigliano could have made a comfortable living churning out film scores: his versatility, orchestral wizardry and fluency are undeniable.” BBC Music Magazine

“Fern Hill is a blithe poem, yet touched by darkness; time finally holds the poet “green and dying” …Poem in October begins in Thomas’s seafront town: the poet, marking his birthday, climbs to a high hill, wherehe reflects on his youth and mulls his future … Poem on his Birthday distorts the “lamb-white days”of Fern Hill to the grotesqueries of “herons who walk in their shroud”: Poem in October’s sparkling ocean becomes a gull-haunted river Styx … Author’s Prologue – his penultimate work – was a lavish, exultant poem that bellowed with lust and life. It called for music as unusual as it was buoyant. And it offered A Dylan Thomas Trilogy the formal inevitability I always dreamed for it …" John Corigliano

“Corigliano could have made a comfortable living churning out film scores: his versatility, orchestral wizardry and fluency are undeniable.” BBC Music Magazine

“The Allen baritone is in full, eloquent form, with a ring of mature authority and faultless diction” The Financial Times

… A colleague suggested that I look into the poetry of the songs of Bob Dylan. Having not yet listened to the songs, I decided to send away for the texts only … and found many of them to be every bit as beautiful and as immediate as I had heard – and surprisingly well-suited to my own musical language … these would be in no way arrangements, or variations, or in any way derivations of the music of the original songs, which I decided to not hear before the cycle was complete … I intended to treat the Dylan lyrics as the poems I found them to be. Nor would their settings make any attempt at pop or rock writing. I wanted to take poetry I knew to be strongly associated with popular art and readdress it in terms of concert art – crossover in the opposite direction, one might say. Dylan granted his permission, and I set to work. John Corigliano