Marga Richter (b. 1926) was born in Wisconsin but grew up in Minnesota, beginning her musical studies in Minneapolis before going on to Juilliard where she studied piano with Rosalyn Tureck and composition with Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma, earning a Masters in Composition. Richter’s music began appearing in the early 1950s on MGM Records and was awarded high praise from critics then as now. Early in Richter’s career, Peggy Glanville-Hicks wrote in the New York Herald Tribune of her “sense of drama” and “ability to make her own forms grow from the very nature of her materials,” while Lawrence Sterne described her “great power and subtlety” and Alfred Frankenstein praised her Piano Sonata in High Fidelity as “formidable, complex, and highly dramatic...[an] extremely vital and rewarding musical communication.” Over thirty years later Derek Henry, in the Atlanta Constitution, said of her second piano concerto, Landscapes of the Mind I, that “...the piece challenges, compels, soothes, stimulates, and ultimately enthralls.”
Richter has written to date over seventy-five works, for which she has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund, the National Federation of Music Clubs, Meet the Composer and ASCAP. Among them are ballets (Abyss and Bird of Yearning), two piano concertos, the Düsseldorf Concerto (for flute, harp, viola, percussion, and strings), an opera (Riders to the Sea), the well-known Lament for Strings, chamber pieces such as Seacliff Variations for piano quartet, Qhanri (snow mountain)—Tibetan Variations for cello and piano, Landscapes of the Mind II for violin and piano, and pieces for solo piano, chorus, organ and voice. These have been performed (and many commissioned) by such artists as Jessye Norman, Menahem Pressler, William Masselos, Natalie Hinderas, Walter Trampler and Daniel Heifetz, by groups such as the Düsseldorf Ensemble and the Sea Cliff Chamber Players, and by over fifty orchestras including the Minnesota, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Atlanta, and London (which recorded her Blackberry Vines and Winter Fruit) Philharmonics . Richter’s music has been issued on recordings by MGM, Gasparo, Grenadilla, Leonarda and Musical Heritage Society, and a performance of Out of Shadows and Solitude by Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony is scheduled for release on MMC. Her scores are published by Carl Fischer, G. Schirmer, Elkan-Vogel, Broude Brothers, Vivace Press and Shrewsbury Press, and she is included in the Major Figures in the American Music Oral History Series at Yale University as well as in Grove’s and Baker’s. |
