John McCabe (composer)

John McCabe, CBE (21 April 1939 – 13 February 2015) was a British composer and pianist. He created works in many different forms, including symphonies, ballets, and solo works for the piano. He served as principal of the London College of Music from 1983 to 1990. Guy Rickards described him as "one of Britain’s finest composers in the past half-century" and "a pianist of formidable gifts and wide-ranging sympathies."

McCabe was born in Huyton, Liverpool, Merseyside on 21 April 1939. His father was a physicist. McCabe was badly burned in an accident when he was a child and was home schooled for eight years. During this time, McCabe said that there was "a lot of music in the house", which inspired his future career. He explained "My mother was a very good amateur violinist and there were records and printed music everywhere. I thought that if all these guys – Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert – can do it, then so can I!" McCabe later suppressed his early symphonies, believing they were not good enough. He subsequently attended Liverpool Institute.

A prolific composer from an early age, McCabe had written thirteen symphonies by the time he was eleven (Rickards 2001). After studies at the Royal Manchester College of Music (now the Royal Northern) and in Munich, with composers Thomas Pitfield, Harald Genzmer and others, he embarked upon a career as both a composer and a virtuoso pianist. Guy Rickards considers McCabe's early works to have been overlooked because he was perceived as a pianist rather than a composer. One of his early successes was the orchestral song cycle Notturni ed Alba (1970), based on a set of poems in medieval Latin about the theme of night, which was described by Gramophone as "an intoxicating creation, full of tingling atmosphere and slumbering passion". His Concerto for Orchestra (1982) brought him international recognition, but it was not until the 1990s that he came to be viewed primarily as a composer, with the successes of the piano work Tenebrae (1992–3), which marked the deaths in 1992 of musicians Sir Charles Groves, William Mathias and Stephen Oliver, and was written for Barry Douglas; his Fourth Symphony, Of Time and the River (1993–4); and his third ballet Edward II (1995), which won the 1998 Barclays Theatre Award.

...
Wikipedia