Call for Score
Winning Composers
Andrea Mattevi
Composer
First Prize "I Giardini della Luce II" for alto saxophone and piano
Andrea Mattevi is composer and violist. His music has been performed by Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Basel Sinfonietta, Orchestra Haydn of Trento and Bozen, Mivos quartet, Cracovia Sinfonietta, Peter Rundel, Marco Angius, Maria Grazia Bellocchio, Ben Omar, Francesco Dillon, MDI ensemble, Alterego ensemble, Dédalo ensemble, Appassionato ensemble, Ensemble Windkraft Kapelle für Neue Musik, Interensemble, ADMSoundscape ensemble, Freon ensemble, L’arsenale, Impronta ensemble and others. He carries out an articulated artistic performance activity with the viola either as soloist and either in chamber formations (founder of the MotoContrario ensemble) and in the orchestral context, collaborating with important orchestral groups and foundations such as the RAI Orchestra of Turin, Orchestra Haydn, the Petruzzelli Theater Orchestra and many others.
COMPOSITION
His music is characterized by the emergence of different coexisting temporal layers and by a structured juxtaposition of sonorities and texture that seek an expressive brightness. He won the second prize at the Toru Takemitsu Award, first prize at the International Composition Competition “Franco Evangelisti”, Royal Krakow Sinfonietta Competition, ETHE Txistu Composition Competition, he has been finalist at the Basel Composition Competition, he has been awarded and recognized in several international competition such as the Ensemble Écoute (Paris), Styrian Tone Art(Graz), “Togni” (Brescia), “Città di Udine” (Udine), Szimanowski (Katowice), Donatoni International (Milan), “Impronta” Competition (Mannheim-Budapest), “Appassionato ensemble” (Como), “V. Bucchi” (Rome), AN Artistry (Athens) and others and selected and performed in several call for scores as MDI ensemble (Milan), Dédalo ensemble (Brescia), “Rumore Bianco” (Foggia) and other.
He has received commissions from the Haydn Orchestra Foundation (Trento and Bolzano), the Filarmonica di Rovereto, the JFutura orchestra and other. His original works have been published by various publishers as Suvini Zerboni (Milano), SconfinArte (Milano), Impronta edition (Mannheim), TEM (Udine).
He is perfected with Ivan Fedele at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, with Luc Brewaeys and Robin De Raff in CODARDS (Rotterdam), with Azio Corghi and Mauro Bonifacio at the Accademia Chigiana (Siena) and at the three-year diploma at the “Romanini” Foundation (Brescia) and and he followed courses with Salvatore Sciarrino, Lei Liang, Alessandro Solbiati, Stefano Gervasoni and others, VIPA (Valencia), Corsi di alto perfezionamento in Monterubbiano and at the Conservatory of Milan.
VIOLA
He has played in various festivals as a soloist and in chamber performances at CIM (Udine), Espacios Sonoros (Sevilla), Festival Cluster (Lucca), Festival Il Suono (Città di Castello), In_Contemporanea (Piacenza), Festival Contrasti (Trento), Mondi Sonori (Trento) and others and in orchestral formations such as the the RAI National Orchestra symphonic Season (Turin), Venice Biennale Music, Symphonic Season of Teatro “Petruzzelli” (Bari), Olympic Theater Season (Rome), Season of Teatro Comunale di Treviso, Due Mondi Festival (Spoleto), Audi-Mozart and others.
He perfected in viola with Simonide Braconi, Luca Ranieri, Davide Zaltron at the “Romanini” Foundation (Brescia), at the Scuola di Musica of Milan, at the Santa Cecilia Foundation (Portogruaro) and at the Accademia di alto perfezionamento della Serenissima (Sacile) and she attended violin, viola and chamber music courses with Carlo Costalbano, Pavel Berman, Ilya Grubert, Massimo Quarta, Enzo Porta, Dimitrios Polisoidis, Aldo Campagnari and Francesco Dillon (Prometeo Quartet) and others, attending courses at IMPULS (Graz), CODARTS (Rotterdam) and Italian conservatories.
Robin Haigh
Composer
Second Prize "Grin" For Chamber Orchestra
Irish/British composer Robin Haigh (b.1993) works internationally with leading orchestras and soloists, writing pieces of “scintillating unpredictability” (Tom Service, BBC Radio 3) that have also been described as “timeless,” “dream-like” (Musical Opinion Magazine), and “remarkably discombobulating” (Seen and Heard International). Haigh’s work first gained widespread attention in 2017, when his recorder quintet In Feyre Foreste won him a British Composer Award aged just 24, being described by the judges as “completely refreshing” and “magical.”
Recent years have seen Haigh produce a string of celebrated works for orchestra and large ensemble. The Britten Sinfonia commission Grin was honoured with a 2020 Ivor Novello Award, described by the judges as a “bold and original work with a highly distinctive musical language and sound.” Soon after, Haigh’s orchestral piece SLEEPTALKER made its debut at the Royal Festival Hall in a London Philharmonic Orchestra concert conducted by Jack Sheen and curated by Brett Dean to reflect composers’ responses to the pandemic. The Telegraph’s Ivan Hewitt described the Ivor Novello-nominated piece as “an engagingly odd landscape of modernist fragments and other musical memories”, also writing that “the seriousness of all these composers […] was an inspiration.”
2022 saw the premieres of two works for the Hanover-based Orchester im Treppenhaus: AESOP 2, an Ivor Novello-nominated piece for untrained recorder soloist, large ensemble and electronics, and FILTH for large amplified ensemble. AESOP 2, in which the composer himself played the role of soloist, was hailed in the German press as “sophisticated”, “hypnotic” and “artful”, and was scored 49 points out of 50 by the audience present at the Composer Slam European Championship in Hanover, where the piece was chosen as joint-winner. Commissioned shortly after, FILTH was written for the Orchestra’s radical ‘DISCO’ concert series, which reimagines the concert experience as something more akin to a techno club. Immediately popular with audiences across Germany, FILTH has been programmed at, amongst others, Beethovenfest Bonn and Hamburg’s Elphilharmonie since premiering at the TauberPhilharmonie in Weikersheim.
Perhaps his most ambitious work is 2022’s quadruple concerto THE DREAMERS for four trombones and large ensemble. An Aldeburgh Festival commission, the 20-minute work brought together the combined forces of Slide Action Trombone Quartet, Britten Pears Contemporary Ensemble, and conductor Jonathan Berman. The piece received significant attention in the ‘What Is Metamodern?’ journal article Here’s to the Dreamers: Jennifer Walshe, Robin Haigh and the Birth of the Metamodern Composer, in which author Zygmund De Somogyi characterises the work as “idiomatic and unique,” “blending together styles […] in a way that feels genuine, honest, real.”
He studied at Goldsmiths College and the Royal Academy of Music with Dmitri Smirnov, Edmund Finnis, and David Sawer, and worked as an assistant to Sir Harrison Birtwistle. In 2021 he completed his AHRC funded PhD, “Composing Millennial Nostalgia”, that was undertaken at the University of York and supervised by Martin Suckling.
Martin Lichtfuss
Composer
Third Prize "Hyperion-Fragmente" for piano
After wide-ranging studies at the University of Vienna
(German and English philology) and at the University of
Music in Vienna (composition, conducting), Martin
Lichtfuss, born in 1959, acquired extensive practical experience during
10 years as a conductor at German and Austrian
theatres. From 1995-2005 he was head of Department I
for music theory/musical directing, at the same time
instructing a class in composition at the Tyrolean State Conservatory. In 2005, he
followed a call from the University of Music in Vienna, where he was given a
professorship in compositional techniques.
In his compositions – for which he has been awarded several prizes – Martin
Lichtfuss attempts to combine the diverging trends of New Music in a personal
manner so as to use the variety of contemporary languages without committing to
any specific ideology.