Sheet music by Michael Radulescu

Michael Radulescu comes from a family of musicians and was born in 1943 as the son of a Romanian father and a German mother. After his first music lessons at home and his first attempts at composition, he began studying organ with Victor Bickerich in 1956 and composition with the prominent Reger student Mihail Jora in 1957.

After attending the summer academies "Mozarteum" in Salzburg in 1964 and 1965 and meeting Carl Orff and Thrasybulos Georgiades, he continued his studies at the Academy (now University) for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna as a pupil of Anton Heiller (organ) and Hans Swarowsky (conducting).

As a composer, Radulescu was initially decisively influenced by his early involvement with the music of Hindemith and Webern, and subsequently received decisive impulses from the compositions of Schönberg, Boulez and Ligeti, as well as from the sounds of medieval music, the works of Olivier Messiaen and Carl Orff. The turn towards the earliest musical outlook and the inclusion of the oldest, elementary compositional techniques and concepts of form, together with contemporary playing practices in his musical language, give it its expression in the field of tension between the perception of time in early epochs and that of our time, in the temporal and spatial organisation of the sound material and its parameters, in their relation to language, gesture and movement. Michael Radulescu’s compositional oeuvre includes choral works, organ music, works for voice and organ, for choir and orchestra, orchestral and ensemble music and has received recognition through commissions from important ensembles as well as numerous awards and distinctions. In 2003 the sensational world premiere of his Passion ("Suffering and Death of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ"), commissioned by the Graz Cathedral, took place in Graz Cathedral.