Nicholas Maw
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
Nicholas Maw (born 1935) is a British composer.
Nicholas Maw is best known for his gigantic orchestral piece Odyssey (1987), the guitar work Music of Memory (1989), and a violin concerto (1993) for Joshua Bell. Although his musical language has often been described as 'neo-romantic', being in the extended tonal vocabulary grounded in the practice of Edward Elgar, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, much of his work has also explored more modernistic and so-called atonal languages, such as the on-going cycle of piano pieces, Personae.
Maw's Sophie's Choice (2002), a large-scale opera based on the book of the same name by William Styron, was co-commissioned by the BBC's Radio 3 and the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, and was premiered by the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in November, 2002, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.
Nicholas Maw is currently a member of the composition faculty at the Peabody Conservatory of Music of the Johns Hopkins University.
