Composer and conductor Ivan Moody was born in London in 1964. He studied music and theology at the Universities of London (winning the Royal Holloway Prize in 1984 for his Three Poems of Anna Akhmatova), Joensuu and York (where he obtained his Ph.D), his composition teachers being Brian Dennis, Sir John Tavener and William Brooks. He lives in Estoril, Portugal, with his wife, the singer Susana Diniz Moody, and their three children, Sebastian, Sofia and Barbara.
Eastern liturgical chant has had a profound influence on his music, as has the spirituality and liturgy of the Orthodox Church. His music has been performed and broadcast all over Europe, in Japan, the USA and South America. Following the enormous success of Canticum Canticorum I, written for the Hilliard Ensemble and performed by them all over the world, in 1990 he won the Arts for the Earth Festival Prize for Prayer for the Forests, which was subsequently premièred by the renowned Tapiola Choir in Finland. One of his most important works to date is the oratorio Passion and Resurrection (1992), based on Orthodox liturgical texts, which was premièred in June 1993 by Red Byrd and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under Tõnu Kaljuste at the Tampere Festival and recorded by Finnish Radio. It has subsequently been repeated and broadcast to great acclaim in the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, the Netherlands and Great Britain, and has been recorded on CD by Hyperion. The work was toured in the USA (Portland, Seattle, Irvine and Los Angeles) in October 2002 by Cappella Romana, under the composer’s direction, to rapturous applause.
The same year also produced the viola concerto Vigil of the Angels, premièred to a standing ovation by its dedicatee Alexandre Delgado and the Lisbon Sinfonietta, and the following year Ivan Moody completed a ‘cello concerto, Epitaphios, which was premièred with tremendous success by Raphael Wallfisch and La Camerata at the Megaron Mousikis in Athens in May 1995, and subsequently taken up by Paul Marleyn and the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, who gave the work’s triumphant Canadian première (recorded and broadcast by CBC) in October 1999. The Armenian ‘cellist Levon Mouradian gave its Portuguese première with the Lisbon Sinfonietta in November 2002. Among the series of vocal works written subsequently, of particular importance are two works for the German ensemble Singer Pur: Le Renard et le Buste, first performed in the Bayreuth Opera House in June 1995, and Lamentation of the Virgin, which received its first performance in Nuremberg in May 1995. This work was subsequently recorded by Singer Pur on a disc for Oehms Classics in 2003. 1996 saw the first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 by the Taverner Consort under Andrew Parrott of Revelation, a substantial choral work with narrator on texts from The Apocalypse, and the first performances of In Nomine by Fretwork in Evia, Greece and the cycle Endechas y Canciones, by the Hilliard Ensemble, in Leipzig, subsequently recorded on their double album for ECM, “A Hilliard Songbook”.… (see more on IvanMoody.co.uk)
Ivan Moody Discography
