Philippe Fenelon (Composer)
French composer (born 1952). On completing his studies in Olivier
Messiaen's class at the Paris National Conservatory of Music (Conservatoire
National Supérieur de Musique de Paris), Philippe Fénelon was awarded the 1977
Prize for Composition. He has also studied comparative literature and
linguistics as well as Bulgarian at the School of Modern Oriental Languages
(École des Langues Orientales Vivantes).
Scholar-in-Residence at the Casa Velasquez in Spain from 1981 to 1983, prior
to being invited to Berlin in 1988 by the German Academic Exchange Service -
Belin Arts Programme (Deutscher Akademischer Austauchdienst - Berliner
Künstlerprogramm), he has been awarded many national and international prizes
including the Stockhausen Prize, Bergamo, Italy, in 1980 ; the Georges
Wildenstein Prize in 1983 ; the Hervé Dugardin (Sacem) in 1984. He held a
fellowship from the Beaumarchais Foundation in Paris in 1990, and received the
External Villa Médicis Prize in 1991 as well as the Prize for New Talents in
Musical Drama of the SACD in 1992. In 2000, he was named Chevalier de l'Ordre
National du Mérite.
Philippe Fénelon is interested in almost all forms
of music though he has a marked preference for music with solo voices or with
instruments (" Du, meine Welt ! " for cello and ensemble ; Saturne for violin
and orchestra ; the Mythologies cycle ; two concertos for piano and orchestra)
and opera (Le Chevalier imaginaire, after Cervantès and Kafka ; Les Rois, after
Cortázar ; Salammbô, after Flaubert).
He has composed more than eighty works which have been interpreted at
numerous festivals : Festival d'Automne of Paris, Venice Biennial, Guggenheim
Museum of New york, Festival Neur Musik Berlin, Salzburg Mozarteum, Amsterdam,
Tokyo, Madrid, Warsaw, Budapest, Geneva,, Odessa, Lisbon...
Intentionally stemming from an original and fertile culture which is at one
and the same time musical, poetical and pictorial, Philippe Fénelon's works do
not hesitate to revisit traditional musical forms (opera, quartet, concerto or
madrigal). After having composed Salammbô, and notably Dix-huit Madrigaux based
on Rilke's Duineser Elegien, Fénelon's style follows a pattern where the texts
set to music have become increasingly intelligible.
|