*1958, Geneva
Work
"Le point est la source de tout..." for Solo Flute (2020)
Michael Jarrell, who was born in Geneva in 1958, began his training as a composer in his hometown and later went on to study with Klaus Huber at the Freiburg Musikhochschule. He received prestigious awards early in his career, including the Beethoven Prize of the City of Bonn (1986), the Dutch Gaudeamus Award (1988), and the Young Composers Award of the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung (1990). Residencies and scholarships have taken him to the Cité des Arts in Paris, where he also attended courses at IRCAM, to Tanglewood, and to the Villa Medici and the Istituto Svizzero in Rome. His compositions have been featured prominently at the 1996 Lucerne Festival and the 2000 Musica Nova Helsinki Festival. He has written a number of highly successful music theater works, including the chamber opera Cassandre based on the eponymous novel by Christa Wolf, which has been translated into several languages since its premiere in 1993–94, Galilei after the play by Bertolt Brecht, and the opera Bérénice, commissioned by the Opéra Bastille in Paris and premiered there in 2018. Michael Jarrell’s oeuvre also reveals a continuing interest for the concert genre, from Abschied for piano and orchestra, written for the 2001 Salzburg Festival, to the flute concerto ...Un temps de silence... (2007), premiered by Emmanuel Pahud, to the three concertos Aquateinte, Des nuages et des brouillards, and Emergences-Résurgences for oboe, violin, and viola, respectively, all written in 2016. He has been a professor of composition at the Vienna University of Music since 1993 and at the Geneva Conservatory since 2004. In 2019 he was awarded the renowned Swiss Music Prize.