The Music of Alma Deutscher

November 30, 2017 2:03 PM

Alma Deutscher, born 2005 in England, is a composer, violinist and pianist. She began playing the piano when she was two years old and the violin when she was three. Soon afterwards she started improvising simple melodies on the piano. Her attempts at composition began at age four, when she began writing an opera about a pirate called Don Alonzo. There followed various compositions for violin, piano, viola and voice, as well as works for chamber ensembles that were commissioned by music festivals in England and Switzerland.

Some links:
Slow movement from Alma Deutscher's new Piano Concerto
Quartet movement in A major by Alma Deutscher (aged 7)
(Plenty more to be found on YouTube etc).

posted by lungtaworld (2 comments total)

I omitted to include her home page: https://www.almadeutscher.com/
posted by lungtaworld at 2:10 PM on November 30, 2017

This is lovely to listen to and very heartening! I went through a few of her pieces on YouTube.
Given that it's invidious to criticize a child's work the way one would an adult's, it mostly sounds like very well-done Mozart pastiche; I'm really looking forward to seeing what she goes on to do.

(I have often fantasized about various composers getting together in heaven, assuming there were to be one, and sharing styles that postdated them; Bach would become a jazz fanatic, I'll bet. Alma Deutscher has the stylistic Mozart chops along with access to all the harmonic/rhythmic developments of the Romantic, impressionist, and 20th-c composers, plus jazz/rock/non-Western music, so she could do some wonderful things depending on what she chooses.)
posted by huimangm at 12:37 AM on December 1, 2017 [2 favorites]