Conrad Beck

Conrad Arthur Beck (16 June 1901, Lohn, Schaffhausen – 31 October 1989, Basel) was a Swiss composer.

Beck was the son of a pastor. His stay in Paris between 1924 and 1933 proved crucial to his artistic development, where he studied with Jacques Ibert and also made contact with Arthur Honegger, Nadia Boulanger, and Albert Roussel. Returning to Basel in 1933, he headed the music department of Radio Basel for the next thirty years. He helped mediate cultural exchange through his many contacts with Swiss and international musicians.

At the suggestion of Swiss conductor Paul Sacher (1906–1999), who promoted his career more than any other composer, Beck settled in Basel in 1934. During a period of over 50 years, Sacher commissioned his works and conducted their premieres with the chamber orchestra Basler Kammerorchester and the Collegium Musicum Zürich. From 1939 to 1966 Beck worked as music director of Swiss Radio in Basel, a position that enabled him to do a great deal to promote contemporary music.

On the occasion of Paul Sacher's 70th birthday, Beck was asked, together with 11 composer friends (Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Benjamin Britten, Henri Dutilleux, Wolfgang Fortner, Alberto Ginastera, Cristobal Halffter, Hans Werner Henze, Heinz Holliger, Klaus Huber and Witold Lutosławski), by Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich to write a composition for cello which used the notes creating Sacher's name: eS, A, C, H, E, Re (E♭, A, C, B, E, D). Beck created a three-movement work entitled Für Paul Sacher, Drei Epigramme for cello solo. The compositions were partially presented in Zürich on 2 May 1976. The first complete performance of the "eSACHERe" project will be given by Czech Cellist František Brikcius in Prague this autumn 2010-2011.

His honours include the composition prize of the Schweizerischer Tonkünstlerverein (1954), the Ludwig Spohr Prize of the city of Brunswick (1956) and the Basle Arts Prize (1964).

Beck's music is characterized by a large measure of seriousness, tenacity, and depth of expression, but also by transparency and a sense of harmonic proportion. He composed a number of orchestral and choral works in the style of Arthur Honegger, the best known of which was Der Tod zu Basel, a piece for choir, soloists, speaker, and orchestra. Besides opera, his work extended to all kinds of instrumental and vocal music, including seven symphonies, seven concertos, chamber music, one oratorio, one lyric cantata, one elegy, and one ballet, Der große Bär.

Selected works

Stage
Orchestra
  1. "Dans le lointain..."
  2. "...et dans le présent"
Concertante
Chamber music
Piano
Organ
Vocal

References

  1. ↑ Published by Schott c. 1930 as Sinfonie nr. 5, für Orch. 1930. See Hofmeisters Monatsberichte. ÖNB (Leipzig: Friedrich Hofmeister). January 1931. Retrieved 2014-06-14. However, the date at that HMB link may simply reflect the 1930 copyright on the score (OCLC 730050049), though the print was received by Hofmeisters Monatsberichte in January 1931.

External links