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Nicola LeFanu

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Name
  
Nicola LeFanu

Role
  
Composer

Parents
  
Elizabeth Maconchy


Nicola LeFanu wwwldsmorguksitesdefaultfilesartistsnicola

Books
  
Lefanu the Green Children Chorus Score

Education
  
University of London, Royal College of Music, St Hilda's College, Oxford

Similar People
  
David Lumsdaine, Elizabeth Maconchy, John‑Edward Kelly, Judith Weir, Thomas Simaku

Nicola lefanu moon over the western ridge mootwingee quartet for saxophones 1985


Nicola Frances LeFanu (born 28 April 1947) is a British composer, academic, lecturer and director.

Contents

Nicola lefanu wind blown seeds 2012


Life

Nicola LeFanu was born in Wickham Bishops, Essex, England, to William LeFanu and Elizabeth Maconchy (also a composer, later Dame Elizabeth Maconchy). She studied at St Hilda's College, Oxford, before taking up a Harkness Fellowship at Harvard. In 1972 she won the Mendelssohn Scholarship. She later became Director of Music at St Paul's Girls' School (1975–77), taught at King's College London (1977–1995, as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Professor), and then a Professor of Music at the University of York where she was Head of Department from 1994 to 2001. She retired from teaching in 2008.

In 1979 she married the composer David Lumsdaine.

She earned a Doctorate in Music from the University of London in 1988 and holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Durham and Aberdeen and from the Open University. She is active in many aspects of the musical profession, as composer, teacher and director.

Works

LeFanu has written around sixty works, including music for orchestra, chamber groups and voices, as well as six operas. These have been widely played and broadcast, and many are available on CD. Her music is published by Chester Novello and Edition Peters.

Her operas are:

  • Dawnpath, a chamber opera (1977),
  • The Story of Mary O'Neill, a radio opera (1986)
  • The Green Children, a children's opera to a libretto by Kevin Crossley-Holland (1990), based on the Green children of Woolpit
  • Blood Wedding (1992, libretto by Debra Levy after Federico García Lorca)
  • The Wildman, another collaboration with Crossley-Holland, commissioned by the Aldeburgh Foundation and first performed in June 1995
  • Light Passing (libretto by John Edmonds, BBC/NCEM, York, 2004), which played to sellout audiences and received critical acclaim
  • Some of her recent works are:

  • Echo and Narcissus for two pianos
  • Concertino for chamber orchestra
  • Catena for eleven solo strings (2001)
  • Amores for solo horn and string orchestra (2003)
  • Piano Trio (2003)
  • Songs without Words for clarinet and string trio (2005), dedicated to Ian Mitchell and the Ensemble Gemini.
  • Songs for Jane for soprano and viola (2005), "written for my cousin Jane Darwin" and dedicated "for Carola to sing to Jane"
  • References

    Nicola LeFanu Wikipedia