 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Antony Pitts was born in 1969 and sang as a boy in the Chapel Royal, Hampton Court Palace. He was an Academic Scholar and later Honorary Senior Scholar at New College, Oxford and graduated in 1990 with First-Class Honours in Music. In the same year he founded the ensemble TONUS PEREGRINUS, and in 2004 won a Cannes Classical Award for their debut Naxos CD of Arvo Pärt's Passio (also a UK No.1 and The Gramophone "Editor's Choice"). Naxos have since released a series of key milestones of Western music performed by TONUS PEREGRINUS under his direction: the first polyphony and music in four parts - LEONIN, PEROTIN Sacred Music from Notre-Dame Cathedral, the first-ever opera - Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion, the first polyphonic settings of the Mass and the Passion - The Mass of Tournai, the first new sounds of the Renaissance - Sweet Harmony - masses and motets by John Dunstaple, and a brand-new realization of the first English hymnbook from 1623 - Hymns and Songs of the Church including six of his own hymns. TONUS PEREGRINUS's recording of Antony's Seven Letters and other sacred choral music is available on Hyperion (also an "Editor's Choice" in The Gramophone). Antony joined the BBC in 1992, and became a Senior Producer for BBC Radio 3. He was awarded the Radio Academy BT Award for Facing the Radio (1995) - one of the first live interactive experiments on the internet. He has developed an extremely personal style of "heterophonic radio" which emerged for the first time in a BBC Radio 3 Between the Ears piece, Virtual Strangers (1996). For the turn of the Millennium he devised The Unfinished Symphony - an 18-hour history of Western music. He has been nominated seven times for the Prix Italia for Chromatic Fantasy (1994); Gould, Tobacco, Bach (1998); Tabula rasa (1998); Credo: The Future of Music (2000); A Parisian in Paradise (2002); The Rise and Fall of the English Cadence (2002); and in 2004 he was awarded the Prix Italia Radio Music prize for A Pebble in the Pond. Antony has also presented series on the music of Olivier Messiaen, Guillaume de Machaut, Hildegard of Bingen and Arvo Pärt, and has guest-presented BBC Radio 4's Something Understood. In 2004 he devised and produced A Passion 4 Radio in which all four Gospel accounts of the Passion were presented in parallel. He gained some notoriety in 2005 for resigning his BBC Senior Producer post partly in order to be able to speak freely to the media about the ill-advised broadcast of Jerry Springer the Opera; he has since founded Golden Radio, and its first independent production was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in March 2006 entitled Not in my name. Antony has been composing since he can remember and his music has been performed across Europe and in the USA, including Wigmore Hall and Westminster Cathedral in London, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and the Philharmonie Kammermusiksaal in Berlin. He has been commissioned by the Berlin Radio Choir, Cambridge Voices, the Clerks' Group, European Chamber Opera, King's College London, New Chamber Opera, Peter Johnson Entertainments, Schola Cantorum of Oxford, the Swingle Singers, and the Choir of Westminster Cathedral, as well as the Edington Festival of Music within the Liturgy, the Kingston-upon-Thames Festival of the Voice, the London Festival of Contemporary Church Music, and the Oxford Festival of Contemporary Music. Faber Music selected two of his scores to launch their New Choral Works series, and also publish The Naxos Book of Carols and his 40-voice motet XL (a companion piece for Tallis's Spem in alium) - released on Harmonia Mundi. Antony teaches composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London where he is Senior Lecturer in Creative Technology. 
|