contemporary classical

Henryk Mikołaj Górecki (born December 6, 1933 in Czernica, Silesia, Poland. Died 12 November 2010 in Katowice, Poland) was a Polish composer of classical music. Though his earlier work in the late 1950s and 1960s were characterised by a dissonant modernism influenced by Nono, Stockhausen and contemporaries Penderecki and Serocki, he moved in the mid 1970's towards a 'pure' sacred minimalist sound encapsulated by the 1976 Symphony No. 3.

Sophie Hutchings is Australian pianist and composer. Having begun playing piano young growing up in a musical family, Sophie started writing properly in her teens. Sophie’s compositions move from disarmingly spare and elegant beginnings to curl out with a tingling edge, propelling its austerity into urgent and epic realms. Violin, cello, drums, percussion and organ heighten the flight these pieces can take as well as dip and swell within the more dimly lit moods of gentler nuance, casting a particular spell across the range of feeling captured in Sophie’s playing.

Thomas Adès (born in London, 1 March 1971) is a British composer, pianist and conductor. Adès studied piano with Paul Berkowitz and later composition with Robert Saxton at Guildhall School,London. He graduated in 1992 from King's College, Cambridge after studying with Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway. His degree was classified as "double starred first", indicating outstanding academic distinction. He was made Britten Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music, and in 2004 was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Essex.

Peter Sculthorpe (born April 29, 1929) is a noted Australian composer from Launceston, Tasmania. He is known primarily for his orchestral and chamber music, such as Kakadu (1988) and Earth Cry (1992), which evoke the sounds and feeling of the Australian bushland and outback. He has also written several string quartets, using unusual timbre effects, and works for piano. Sculthorpe's catalogue consists of more than three hundred and fifty works and, apart from juvenilia, a good part of it is regularly performed and recorded throughout the world.