Georges Lentz

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1 Life and music
2 Principal works
- 2.1 Caeli enarrant... (1989 to date)
3 External links

[edit] Life and music

Georges Lentz is a contemporary classical composer, born in Luxembourg in 1965, and is the country's best known composer. Since 1990, he has been living in Australia. He is now also considered one of Australia's leading composers.

Lentz studied music at the Paris Conservatoire and the Hannover Musikhochschule. In 1989, he began working on a cycle of compositions under the name Caeli enarrant... (The Heavens are telling...), from Psalm 29). His music is concerned with astronomy and a love of the Australian landscape and indigenous Australian art, reflecting his spiritual and existential beliefs, questions and doubts. The Vale of Glamorgan Festival (UK), where Lentz was a featured composer in 2006, introduced his music as "...an awestruck and almost fearful response to the beauties and mysteries of the universe; a massive, personal creative undertaking from which this intense, almost obsessive composer is painstakingly extracting concert works...a unique voice whose music is genuinely moving despite its brittle austerity and unearthliness, and captures some of the most evocative silences imaginable."

His work Guyuhmgan, from part VII of this cycle (Mysterium), was the foremost recommended work at UNESCO's 2002 International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. His latest composition is a work for viola and orchestra called ' Monh' written for German soloist Tabea Zimmermann.

Being given to self-doubt and reclusiveness, Lentz rarely writes new works and rarely accepts commissions. He is said to retire to a monastery or the Australian desert to find inspiration and compose. He does not give interviews.

His music is published by Universal Edition, Vienna.

[edit] Principal works

[edit] Caeli enarrant... (1989 to date)

Part	Subtitle	Year	Instrumentation
I		1989-1998	orchestra
III		1990-2000	12 strings, 3 percussionists, 1 boy soprano
IV		1991-2000	string quartet, 4 suspended cymbals
V		1989-1992	prepared piano
VII Mysterium	Birrung	1997-2004	11 strings
	Ngangkar	1998-2000	orchestra
	Nguurraa	2000-2001	clarinet, violin, cello, percussion and piano
	Guyuhmgan	2000-2001	orchestra and electronics
	Alkere	2002-2004	prepared piano
	Monh	2001-2005	solo viola, orchestra and electronics