ROTA, NINO (1911–1979)

Pianist Eleanor Hodgkinson divides her time between performing, teaching and writing. A versatile chamber musician, she has performed and recorded with Mid Wales Opera, Southern Sinfonia, Orchestra of the Swan and Nevill Holt Opera. Hodgkinson is the keyboard coordinator at the Junior Academy of the Royal Academy of Music, where she has taught piano and chamber music for over 20 years; additionally, she is the specialist piano tutor for the LRAM teaching qualification. She is a principal lecturer in piano at Leeds Conservatoire and an external examiner at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and the Royal College of Music. An award-winning student, Hodgkinson studied with Renna Kellaway and Carole Presland at the Royal Northern College of Music. In 2013 she obtained an MA in music psychology from the University of Sheffield.

The core aspects of Rota’s compositional ‘fingerprints’ include the attention he gave to his pre-eminence of melodic line, a harmonic language that supports and drives the music to structural points, multiple stylistic influences that exist within an intertextual framework, and an immediacy in the projection, and importantly in the communication to the listener, of differing emotions in the music. Rota’s works could be placed within a broad neo-Classical perspective, though certain works are clearly neo-Romantic or neo-Baroque.