Param Vir

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Param Vir (born February 6, 1952 in Delhi ) is a contemporary Indian composer. The artist currently lives in London.

life and work

Param Vir was born in Delhi in 1952. His mother was a poet and respected singer, his father an electronic engineer and mathematician. Vir's formative years at home were dominated by Indian classical music. Vir began taking piano lessons at the age of 9; at the age of 14 he took composition lessons. This was the first time Vir came into contact with contemporary western music. This introduction to composition sparked a great passion in the boy and from then on determined his creative work.

Vir's early compositions aroused the interest of Peter Maxwell Davies , who invited him to the Dartington Summer School in 1983 on a scholarship. With the encouragement of Maxwell Davies, Param Vir moved to London in 1984 to study composition. The change of location immediately paid off. Within three years, Vir won the Benjamin Britten Composition Prize (Aldeburgh), the Kucyna International Composition Prize (Boston), the Tippett Composition Award (Dartington) and the Performing Right Society Composition Prize (London).

The opera composer

Since the 1990s, Vir has stood out as an opera composer of considerable talent and high originality. His two one-act operas - Broken Strings and Snatched by the Gods - were commissioned by Hans Werner Henze for the Munich Biennale in 1992 in a production by Pierre Audi and the Dutch Opera. In the following year Param Vir received the Ernst von Siemens Composition Prize (Munich). The success of these two operas can be seen in the numerous performances of the Almeida Opera (1996), the Scottish Opera (1998), the Berlin State Opera (1999) and the Musikwerkstatt Wien (1999). In 2001 the original Pierre Audi production was revived by Muziektheater Transparant and performed in Antwerp, Rotterdam and Rouen. Param Vir's first full-length opera Ion was commissioned by the Aldeburgh Almeida Opera. It premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2000. The first full production of the opera was staged in 2003 in a co-production between the Musiktheater Wales, the Berliner Festwochen and Opera National du Rhin. The premiere started in the 2003/2004 season with a series of seven performances before being performed at the Berliner Festspiele , the Linbury Studio of the Royal Opera House , Covent Garden and on a tour of Great Britain.

Other works

The great orchestral work Horse Tooth White Rock , based on the life of the 11th century Tibetan Saint Milarepa , was commissioned and premiered in 1994 by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Peter Maxwell Davies . It was performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the 2005 BBC Proms , among others .

Other notable works are Ultimate Words - Infinite Song for Bariton Solo, Percussion Sextet and Piano , which was commissioned by the Berlin Festival in 1997. The piece is inspired by the writings of the Danish resistance hero Kim Malthe-Bruun from the Second World War. The Theater of Magical Beans was commissioned by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in 2003 and described by one critic as a "virtuoso and extremely enjoyable, life-affirming work". This was followed in 2005 by Hayagriva , which was premiered by the Schönberg Ensemble in the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam . In 2006 the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave the world premiere of Between Earth and Sky under the direction of Alexander Rumpf . The piece is inspired by Anish Kapoor's Chicago sculpture Cloud Gate . It was highly praised by the Sunday Telegraph : "Even in a calm, ecstatic reflection at the end, the music is held by a structural backbone that suggests a fruitful occupation with Kapoor".

In relation to his opera Ion , Param Vir formulates his artistic credo: “My sense of time does not separate present, past and future; for me it is all present, so Param Vir. Real works of art transcend time and place. "

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Date of birth according to Library of Congress.
  2. ↑ Deutschlandfunk 2003.
personal data
SURNAME Vir, Param
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian composer
DATE OF BIRTH February 6, 1952
PLACE OF BIRTH Delhi