Classical Composers (R)

classical music (and some jazz and folk) on Leonarda CDs etc.
including many women composers, American composers, others, with sample MP3s

Dianne Goolkasian Rahbee (b.1938), a first generation Armenian-American, began early piano studies in Boston and continued her education at the Juilliard School and the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria. At age 40, she began composing more seriously, and has since produced a large body of works for solo piano, orchestra, ensemble, percussion, voice, and various instrumental concerti. Her music has been performed internationally to critical acclaim. Dianne Goolkasian Rahbee's music reflects her background in its mixture of ethnic influences and formal Western musical training. Her pianistic writing follows a style of the traditional keyboard repertoire using an idiom akin to Prokofieff, Scriabin, and Khachaturian. Her neo-tonal musical language is wed to a strong sense of rhythmic drive, creating highly communicative and effective concert pieces.
Three Preludes, Op.68 (solo piano). Audio sample MP3 #1 (:45); MP3 #2 (:14) from Leonarda CD #LE345.

Priaulx Rainier (1903-1986) was born at Howick, Natal, South Africa, of English-Huguenot parents. Her early childhood was spent in a remote part of the country near Zululand, where the liquid language and music of the indigenous people, the sounds of wild animals and the calls of the birds were to prove a lasting influence. She entered the South African College of Music as a violin student at the age of ten, and in 1920 entered the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she settled permanently. Necessity required her to earn her living as a violinist. After a serious car accident in 1935, she turned exclusively to composition, aided by a grant and with the encouragement of composer Sir Arnold Bax. She studied briefly with Boulanger in Paris on a scholarship before the outbreak of World War II. In 1942 Priaulx Rainer was appointed a Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music, a post she held until 1961. Rainier's numerous honors include commissions from the BBC, Peter Pears, and Yehudi Menuhin. The BBC broadcast a retrospective concert featuring her chamber works in 1973, and in 1976 recorded and broadcast her complete chamber music. Quartet for Strings. Audio sample MP3 (:28) from Leonarda CD #LE336.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) Pièce en Forme de Habanera for flute (or violin) and piano. Audio sample MP3 (:12) from Leonarda CD #LE333.

Louise Reichardt (1779-1826) (Germany)  Hier liegt ein Spielmann begraben, audio sample MP3 (:22) and Betteley der Vögel, audio sample MP3 (:30) are on double CD #LE353, which can be used in conjunction with the BOOK "Women Composers: The Lost Tradition Found." (See CD for book information.)
The following works are on LP #LPI 112 (2 LP-set): Tre Canzoni (Giusto Amor, Notturno, Vanne felice rio), Hier liegt ein Spielmann begraben, Betteley der Vögel, Die Blume der Blumen, Bergmannslied, Heimweh (tenor and piano); and Duettino (two tenors and piano). 

Marga Richter (b.1926) Marga Richter was born in Wisconsin and received her early musical training in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She earned a Masters Degree from the Juilliard School, where she majored in piano with Rosalyn Tureck and composition with Vincent Persichetti. Her music has been played by more than fifty orchestras, including the Atlanta and Milwaukee Symphonies, the Minnesota Orchestra and the Buffalo Philharmonic, and recorded by the London Philharmonic Orchestra (Blackberry Vines and Winter Fruit, Leonarda LE331), the Seattle Symphony (Out of Shadows and Solitude, MMC-Master Musicians Collective), and the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra (Spectral Chimes/Enshrouded Hills and Quantum Quirks of a Quick Quaint Quark, MMC). In addition, her music has been released on M-G-M Records, Musical Heritage, Gasparo and Grenadilla.

One of her best-known works, the ballet Abyss, has been performed on five continents by the Harkness Ballet which commissioned it, and by the Joffrey, Boston and Pennsylvania Ballets and other companies. Among the artists who have performed her music are Jessye Norman; pianists Menahem Pressler, William Masselos and Natalie Hinderas; violist Walter Trampler; and violinist Daniel Heifetz, who commissioned her Landscapes of the Mind II for violin and piano, which he included in his prize-winning Tchaikovsky Competition concert in Moscow and recorded for Leonarda (LE337).

Richter's music is published by Carl Fischer, G. Schirmer, Broude Bros., Presser, Vivace and Shrewsbury Press. She has received grants, fellowships, commissions and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Federation of Music Clubs, Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund, Meet The Composer and ASCAP. She is included in the Major Figures in American Music Oral History Series at Yale University, Women and Music in America Since 1900 – An Encyclopedia (selected as one of the best reference books of 2003 by Library Journal), Grove and Bakers. A doctoral thesis by You Ju Lee entitled Marga Richter: A Biographical Sketch and Study of Her Piano Works With Emphasis on Sonata for Piano was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2000.

ORCHESTRA (Richter)
Variations & Interludes on Themes from Monteverdi & Bach, a concerto for violin, cello, piano and orchestra from CD #LE351. 30-second audio samples: MP3#1; MP3#2; MP3#3; MP3#4; MP3#5(trio); MP3#6; MP3#7; MP3 #8.
Blackberry Vines and Winter Fruit, audio sample MP3 (:34) from Leonarda CD #LE331.
Lament (string orchestra), audio sample MP3 (:28) from Leonarda CD #LE327.

STRINGS with PIANO (Richter)
From Leonarda CD #LE337:
Qhanri (snow mountain) - Tibetan Variations for Cello and Piano. Audio samples: MP3 theme (:46); MP3 scherzo (:22); MP3 climax (:30).
Landscapes of the Mind II (:30) (violin and piano). Audio sample MP3 (:24). (Also see Requiem under "solo piano."
From Leonarda double CD #LE353, which can be used in conjunction with the BOOK "Women Composers: The Lost Tradition Found:" The middle sections of Landscapes of the Mind II

SOLO PIANO (Richter)
Requiem, audio sample MP3 (:49) from CD #LE337
Exequy, audio sample MP3 (:27) from CD #LE337.
Exequy sheet music is also available.
Fragments, audio sample MP3 (:21) from CD #LE334. 

TWO CLARINETS and PIANO (Richter)
Sonora is ona Leonarda LP: LP #LPI 122

Bernard Rogers (1893-1968) taught at the Eastman School of Music for many years, becoming chairman of the composition department. Early in his career, he was a member of the editorial staff of Musical America. His first ambition was to become an artist, and he continued to paint as a hobby throughout his life. His interest in art, especially in Japanese prints, continued to influence his music. Soliloquy (solo flute). Audio sample MP3 (:22) from Leonarda CD #LE333.

Ned Rorem (b.1923): Born in Richmond, Indiana and reared in Chicago, Ned Rorem attended Northwestern University where, many years later, he received his first honorary doctorate. He also studied at The Curtis Institute and at Juilliard (M.A. degree 1948). Soon after, Rorem moved to Morocco and then to France where he lived until 1958. A Pulitzer Prize winner, Rorem has also been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, three Ford Foundation grants, several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a grant from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (to which he was elected a member in 1979). His instrumental pieces have been conducted by such international artists as Bernstein, Mitropoulos, Ormandy, Paray, Mehta, Reiner, Steinberg, and Stokowski.
Trio (1959) ( flute, cello and piano). Audio sample MP3 (:24) from Leonarda CD #LE330.

Martin Rosenberg (d. 1943) conducted a worker's chorus under the pseudonym of Rosebery d'Arguto in a suburb of Berlin before the war. In 1939, he was arrested as a socialist and a Jew and sent to Sachsenhausen, where he was brutally tortured. He later formed a chorus of 25 Jewish prisoners that carried out their activities in secret in the less guarded barracks for political prisoners. In 1942, when he discovered that the Jewish prisoners were to be sent to Auschwitz, he wrote the words to Tsen Brider, setting them to the melody of the old Yiddish folk song "Yidl mit dem Fidl." Rosenberg and his chorus died in the gas chambers in 1943. This song was passed down by a non-Jewish prisoner at Sachsenhausen, Alexander Kulisiewicz, who survived the war. Rosenberg asked him not to forget Tsen Brider, and if he should survive, to sing the song and through it tell the world of the suffering in the death camps. Tsen Brider (voice and piano), audio sample MP3 (1:20) from Leonarda CD #LE342. 

Rudd, Dorothy (see Moore, Dorothy Rudd)

Vivian Adelberg Rudow, (b.1936) a Baltimore-based composer, conductor, concert producer, and pianist, received a Master of Music degree from the Peabody Conservatory of Music of Johns Hopkins University. She was the first Maryland composer to receive an orchestral performance in Baltimore's Meyerhoff Symphony Hall (Baltimore Symphony, 1982). Rudow's awards include First Prize in the 1986 14th International Electroacoustic Music Competition, program division (Bourges, France), two Baltimore CityArts Awards; the Maryland State Arts Council Fellowship; and ASCAP awards each year since 1987. Rudow's music has been performed in Asia, Cuba, Europe, Eastern Europe, Puerto Rico and the United States. Writing in genres ranging from electronic, solo instrument, and chamber, to full orchestra, Rudow is a "Sound Portrait Painter," creating sound canvases of life. She uses music to express lives and feelings of people using musical language they can understand. Rebecca's Suite (1989/1991) ( solo piano). Audio samples MP3 #1 (:25) MP3 #2 (:57) from Leonarda CD #LE345.

Links to alphabetical list of composers:
Bios and links to all their recordings at this site