Glenda Dawn Goss, in a book-length study of this singular composer-critic relationship, suggests that Sibelius was in some way crushed by the attention that Downes heaped on him.
The musical trio EVIYAN is Iva Bittová, Gyan Riley, and Evan Ziporyn: three unique composer-performers merging into a singular sound.
Not that anyone is going to dispute the Russian-born composer's singular stature in 20th-century music.
Originally from Chicago and classically trained, Myra Melford is a composer with a singular, kinetic, and lyrical voice in piano improvisation.
In the Baroque era, Bach, Handel, and other masters routinely recycled their own music and reworked the music of others; the idea of the composer as a singular genius blazing an original path was essentially alien before the advent of Beethoven.
"What you want from any artist is a singular personal vision," Max Richter, a composer who contributed to "Arrival," among other films, told me, "and you can see [Levi's] fingerprint transposed onto this score".
Such relentless high drama in the hands of huge forces like these could just as easily have run off the tracks, but this is a composer with a singular talent for inflecting words, making them clear and finding just the right orchestral color for the emotion of the moment.
"Vespertine" was Björk's most ambitious work to date; it made clear what was already implicit in the previous albums — that she was not simply a singer with great taste in collaborators but a full-fledged composer with a singular command of melody, harmony, rhythm, and texture.
He's a gifted magpie, but I can't say he's established a singular personal voice as a composer-lyricist the way the hallowed greats like Berlin, Porter and Sondheim did.
We generally think of composers having a singular, identifiable voice -- people like Sibelius, for example, whose dark string unisons, high-pitched tremolos and exploding crescendos, in this symphony and its companion pieces, are like signatures.
Here Vanska gives us three snapshots of that vital development and it is fascinating, just as so much in this wonderful series of recordings has immeasurably enriched our knowledge of one of the greatest and most singular of all 20th-century composers.
