Ivan Moody

The complete and up-to-date version of Ivan Moody’s site may be found at

http://members.lycos.co.uk/ivanmoody

The present site will remain online for the time being, but will no longer be brought up to date.

Ivan Moody

"the surprising newcomer of British music"
(Aamulehti, Finland)
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IVAN MOODY

BIOGRAPHY

Ivan Moody was born in London in 1964. He studied composition with Brian Dennis at London University (winning the Royal Holloway Prize in 1984 for his Three Poems of Anna Akhmatova), and privately with Sir John Tavener.

Eastern liturgical chant has had a profound influence on his music, as has the spirituality of the Orthodox Church, to which he belongs. His music has been performed and broadcast all over Europe, both East and West, as well as in Japan, the USA and South America. Following the enormous success of Canticum Canticorum I, written for the Hilliard Ensemble and performed by them all over the world, in 1990 he won the Arts for the Earth Festival Prize for Prayer for the Forests, which was subsequently premièred by the renowned Tapiola Choir in Finland. One of his most important works to date is the oratorio Passion and Resurrection, based on Orthodox liturgical texts, which was premièred in June 1993 by Red Byrd and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under Tõnu Kaljuste at the Tampere Festival and recorded by Finnish Radio. It was subsequently repeated and broadcast to great acclaim in the Netherlands, the USA and Great Britain, and has been recorded on CD by Hyperion.

Other significant compositions include the 'cello concerto Epitaphios, which was premièred with great success by Raphael Wallfisch and La Camerata at the Megaron Mousikis in Athens in May 1995, and subsequently taken up by Paul Marleyn and the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, who gave the work's triumphant Canadian première (recorded and broadcast by CBC) in October 1999; and two works for the German ensemble Singer Pur: Le Renard et le Buste, first performed in the Bayreuth Opera House in June 1995, and Lamentation of the Virgin, which received its first performance in Nuremberg in May 1995. 1996 saw the first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 by the Taverner Consort under Andrew Parrott of Revelation, a substantial choral work with narrator on texts from The Apocalypse, and the first performances of In Nomine by Fretwork in Evia, Greece and the cycle Endechas y Canciones, by the Hilliard Ensemble, in Leipzig, subsequently recorded on their double album for ECM, "A Hilliard Songbook".

More recently, Pnevma for recorder and strings, commissioned by the Lisbon Sinfonietta, was premièred with António José Carrilho as soloist at the 1998 Mafra International Festival, and the series of vocal pieces has continued with O Taphos (to a text by Kostas Palomas) for Michael Chance and Fretwork, Lullaby for a Byzantine Princess for the soprano Suzie Leblanc, The Meeting in the Garden, premièred by the Grupo Vocal Olisipo in Lisbon in October 1998, and Words of the Angel, first performed by the Norwegian group Trio Mediaeval in Oslo in December 1998 and subsequently released to tremendous critical acclaim on CD by ECM in 2001. His largest work to date, the Akathistos Hymn, for a cappella choir (the first complete setting of the text since the middle ages), was premièred by the American choir Cappella Romana under Alexander Lingas with resounding success in Portland, Oregon, and repeated in Seattle, in January 1999. The work was also toured in the USA in Spring 2001 and will be recorded on CD in 2002.

1999 saw the first performances of Apokathilosis, (Amarcord Ensemble, Leipzig, May 1999), Cantos Mozárabes II, (premiered at the Mafra Festival in October 1999 by Julia Gooding and Sophie Yates) and Canticle of Light, (premiered by Invocation in Horsham on 31st December, 1999), and, in the following year, The Troparion of Kassiani (premiered by the Trio Mediaeval in Oslo, March 2000), The Adoration of the Lamb (premiered by The Tallis Scholars, Dorchester, July 2000) and Penthos for viola and marimba, premiered by André Cameron and Pedro Carneiro at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon in May 2000. Recent works include The Passion of St Catherine for the Ensemble Oriana, Anghelu for double bass quartet (written for the Lisbon Double Bass Orchestra), The Prophecy of Symeon for the Grupo Vocal Olisipo, commissioned by Oporto European Capital of Culture 2001 and premiered to great acclaim in October 2001, Vecheri Tvoeya, premiered by the Pravoslava Chamber Choir, Lisbon, November 2001, and the string quartet Lamentations of the Myrrhbearer premiered at the Gulbenkian Foundation in December 2001.

Projects for 2002 include works for the English Chamber Choir, the Orchestrutopica, L'Antica Musica, Amarcord and the Israeli singer Yahli Toren.

Ivan Moody's music has been broadcast in many countries, and has been featured on the Finnish television programme Jeesuksen syntymäjuhla and in Britain, on both Channel 4 and BBC television. His work has been featured particularly at the Tampere International Choir Festival (Finland), the Musica Sacra festival in Maastricht (Holland), the York, Thaxted, Little Missenden, Presteigne, Spitalfields and Byzantium in London festivals (Great Britain), the Mafra International Music Festival, Estoril, Leiria and Capuchos Festivals (Portugal) and the Byzantium Festival in Plovdiv (Bulgaria). In 1994 he was Composer in Residence at the Hilliard Summer Festival (which finished with the première of Hymn to the Light), and in 1996 was Composer in Residence for the 3rd International Festival of Voices and Viols in Evia, Greece, which culminated in the first performance of the cantata John in the Desert, to a text by the poet Yannis Ifantis. In 1999 he was invited to give composition seminars at the Universities of Toronto and Manitoba, Canada.

He was until 1998 Professor of Composition at the Academia de Artes e Tecnologias, Lisbon, and is also active as a conductor and writer on music. He has worked with a number of choirs and vocal groups (notably Voces Angelicae and the Kastalsky Chamber Choir in Britain and Capilla Peña Florida in Spain), is a founder member of Ensemble Alpha and the Pravoslava chamber choir and is protopsaltis of the Greek Orthodox Church, Lisbon. He has edited a large number of performing editions of sacred music, including 16th century music from England, Spain, Portugal and Mexico and Russian Orthodox repertoire, much of which is published by the Chester, Faber, Mapa Mundi and Novello publishing houses, and has frequently served as musicological and programme consultant for such specialist performers as The Tallis Scholars, The Sixteen, the Orlando Consort, the Hilliard Ensemble and Westminster Cathedral Choir. He has contributed liner notes for recordings on the Collins Classics, ECM, Etcetera, Gimell, Hyperion, Ikon, Mà de Guido, Philips, Sony and Virgin labels.

Ivan Moody writes regularly for Gramophone, International Record Review and Goldberg (of whose editorial panel he is a member), and has published articles on contemporary and early music in Contact, Composer, Musical Times, Contemporary Music Review, Anuario Musical, Revista Portuguesa de Musicologia, Plainsong & Mediaeval Music, Jacob's Well and Tempo. He is a contributor to the revised edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music, Managing Editor of Harwood Academic Publishers' series Music Archive Publications and one of the editors of De Clavichordio III, to be published in 2002 by Musica Antica, Magnano. He has collaborated regularly with international music festivals, including the Tampere and Turku Festivals (Finland), Juiz de Fora (Brazil), Holland Festival Oude Muziek (Utrecht, Holland), the Gulbenkian Early Music Series (Lisbon, Portugal) and the Almeida and Spitalfields Festivals (London, England).