Thea Musgrave at 95
NewsThe US-based Scottish composer has a big birthday coming up at the end of the month.
Jack Van Zandt celebrates Thea’s considerable achievement, which includes 12 operas, in the British Music Society journal:
Thea Musgrave had every intention of becoming a medical research doctor when she entered her home city’s Edinburgh University in 1947. In fact, she had already made up her mind that she was going to discover cures for the many diseases that plagued humankind, including cancer. When walking to her studies in her first months as a pre-med student, she passed the music school, which was adjacent to the medical school, and found she was increasingly gravitating towards the activities and events emanating from inside the music building. The effect was bewitching, and over the next few months she realised she must study music instead. Medical studies were quickly abandoned (“I didn’t like cutting up frogs,” she says), and Thea, already a good pianist after many years of lessons, embarked on her journey to become one of the world’s most celebrated composers….
Read on here.
Thea Musgrave’s opera Mary Queen of Scots premiered by Scottish Opera at the Edinburgh Festival in the mid-1970s is a marvellous work. That it has not been revived by other UK companies is very sad.
It’s receiving a quite high profile new production at Oper Leipzig this fall.
About time it was revived, and a pity it wasn’t this year by ENO, if not ROH as a 95th birthday tribute. Very underestimated composer but a fine composer. Yet the Estonian Orchestra are on tour in Bradford, West Yorkshire – of all places – in the wonderful newly renovated St George’s Hall with Barry Douglas playing Rach’s Second Piano Concert but also including:
Olari Elts Conductor
Barry Douglas Piano
Arvo Pärt Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten
Rachmaninov Piano Concerto no. 2
interval
Musgrave Song of the Enchanter
Sibelius Symphony No 5
Looking forward to it, all for £17.
A criminally underrated composer, her work is brilliant!
What a pleasure to read this wonderful biographical sketch. Peter And Thea are wonderful artists and treasured friends.
A real composer. Her Concerto for Orchestra (to name one) is as good anything by Lutoslawski. Happy 95th!!
Here’s a transcribed interview with her and Bruce Duffie in Chicago for WNIB Classical 97 radio station.
http://www.bruceduffie.com/musgrave.html
In symphonic terms, I should have added that her horn concerto which I had the pleasure of hearing with Barry Tuckwell and Thea herself conducting is an equally fascinating work. With the four horns placed in various parts of the auditorium and the soloist wandering through the orchestra, it seems to have been the start of an early precedent for expanding the boundaries of the anidience experience. And this was decades before Ivan Fischer’s experiments with audience members interspersed through the orchestra and even Graham Vick’s revolutionary Birmingham Opera.