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Biography
Jeffrey McFadden has been acknowledged as one of the finest guitarists of his generation. Over the past years, concert engagements have taken him throughout Canada and the United States and into Europe. He has given World Premieres of works by numerous composers and has been a featured performer at several international music festivals, including "Guitar '87" and GuitarFest '91 in Toronto , Gitarren-Symposium Iserlohn, Lachine International Guitar Festival, the Columbus State Guitar Symposium, The Niagara International Chambre Music Festival, the National Flute Association (USA) Convention and many others.
In 1992, Jeffery McFadden was awarded a Silver Medal in the prestigious Guitar Foundation of America Competition and was also a prize-winner in the 1993 Great Lakes Guitar Competition. His debut recording was the first in the "Laureate Series" on the Naxos label and was released world-wide. Since it's release, this recording has sold in the thousands of copies. His playing has received enthusiastic critical acclaim; the "Daily Telegraph" of London (UK) exclaimed "McFadden's ability to make the guitar sing is second to none", and "Classic CD" has described his playing as "major artistry". His latest solo release features the complete didactic works by the 19th century composer Napoleon Coste. "ClassicsToday.com" raved about this disc saying, "Jeffrey McFadden is not only an extraordinary guitarist -- he's also an inspired musician."
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Biography
Born in Westphalia in 1926, Henze received his earliest musical training against the background of the rise of Nazism in Germany; his realisation that all the modernist music, art and literature that stimulated him most profoundly had been condemned by the Nazis ingrained in him the belief in the potential of art to be genuinely subversive, inspiring a tendency that was to surface explicitly in his work thirty years later. After the Second World War he resumed his formal education by studying with Wolfgang Fortner, and composed the first pieces that he still acknowledges in an elegant neo-Classical style, which mingled Stravinsky and Hindemith while already demonstrating the innate lyrical gift that has characterised Henze's music in all its phases. In the late 1940s, however, he began to attend the Darmstadt summer schools and realised the value of serialism. But, typically, he did not follow many of his contemporaries in embracing the technique to the exclusion of all else, and instead fused it with his neo-Classical style. The Violin Concerto (1947) first put this synthesis into practice, and it served also for his first opera, "Boulevard Solitude".
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