Faà di Bruno, Giovanni Matteo [Horatio, Orazio] Fabbri, Anna Maria



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Fossis, Petrus de


(d Venice, before 23 July 1526). French singer. He appears on the first extant list of singers at S Marco, Venice, which dates from April 1486. On 31 August 1491 he was named maestro di cappella of the basilica, with responsibility for teaching the choirboys, a position he held until his death, although ill-health forced him to relinquish his duties to Pietro Lupato in October 1525. He was admired as a singer by Pietro Contarini of Venice, who called him a Frenchman (Argo vulgare, 1541). In 1502 the Venetian humanist Angelo Gabrieli, noting his fame not just in the art of music, praised his singing of a composition (or poem) written by Giovanni Armonio on the occasion of Anne of Foix-Candale’s visit to Venice on her way to become Queen of Hungary. If Fossis was a composer, no works exist to prove it. He left his books to the monastery of S Salvatore, Venice; two of them, collections of music treatises, are now in I-PAVu 361 and 450.

BIBLIOGRAPHY


CaffiS

G.M. Ongaro: The Chapel of St Mark’s at the Time of Adrian Willaert (1527–1562): a Documentary Study (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1986), chaps. 2–3

G.M. Ongaro: ‘Willaert, Gritti e Luppato: miti e realtà’, Studi musicali, xvii (1988), 55–70

BONNIE J. BLACKBURN


Foster, Arnold (Wilfred Allen)


(b Sheffield, 6 Dec 1896; d London, 30 Sept 1963). English conductor, composer and educationist. At the RCM he was a pupil of Vaughan Williams, from whom he derived his interest in folk music. He became a music master at Westminster School (1926) and subsequently director (1939–61). He also taught at Morley College, where he succeeded Holst as director of music from 1928 to 1940, and at the Institute of Education at London University from 1945.

His music is mostly based on folksong. Probably best known are his felicitous arrangements of Manx folksongs; he also arranged English folkdance tunes for small orchestra, primarily for the use of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Larger works were the Piano Concerto on Country Dance Tunes (1930) and the ballad opera Lord Bateman (1948–56) to a libretto by Joan Sharp, based on the ballad. He also wrote a ballet, Midsummer Eve, for the Silver Jubilee of the English Folk Dance Society in 1925, an Autumn Idyll (1926, rev. 1930) and a suite for voice and strings, The Fairy Isle (1947), based on Manx folk tunes. He founded two choirs, the English Madrigal Choir (1928–40) and one bearing his own name (in 1946, until his death after one of its concerts) which performed madrigals, works by Purcell and modern works.

FRANK HOWES

Fóster, Gerónimo Baqueiro.


See Baqueiro Fóster, Gerónimo.

Foster, John (i)


(b c1620; d Durham, 20 April 1677). English cathedral musician. He was a chorister of Durham Cathedral in the 1630s, and from Christmas 1660 until his death he served as organist and Master of the Choristers. Three services and eleven anthems by him survive in whole or part (GB-DRc) but do not appear to have circulated outside Durham. His First Service was composed in 1638 when he was still a chorister. His transcripts of the organ parts of anthems and services by Mundy (possibly William Mundy) constitute important sources for those works (DRc A3). Details of the Dallam organ erected in 1661–2 are in his hand (DRc A5).

BIBLIOGRAPHY


B. Crosby: ‘A 17th-Century Durham Inventory’, MT, cxix (1978), 167–70

B. Crosby: A Catalogue of Durham Cathedral Music Manuscripts (Oxford, 1986)

H.W. Shaw: The Succession of Organists of the Chapel Royal and the Cathedrals of England and Wales from c.1538 (Oxford, 1991)

BRIAN CROSBY


Foster, John (ii)


(b Bentley, nr Doncaster, 1752; d High Green, nr Sheffield, 4 Oct 1822). English psalmodist. An amateur musician, he was by profession a coroner. He lived in High Green and (according to A. Gatty: A Life at One Living, 1884) was responsible for the suppression of dog- and cock-fighting. In the preface to his first book, Sacred Music, Consisting of Anthems, Psalms & Hymns (Sheffield, c1820), he described how he ‘devoted a few leisure hours to Musical Composition’ in order to encourage local choirs, and how in west Yorkshire, and the borders of adjacent counties, nearly every village had a choir, accompanied by instruments, some of which, in size and skill, approached ‘the dignity of an Oratorio’. A second book was also published (c1820). Foster's music needs competent performers; it is well written in a Classical style, and unusual in that it is fully scored with elaborate symphonies. His most ambitious setting, of Psalm xlvii (Old Version), requires an orchestra of strings, flute, oboes, bassoon, horns, trumpet and drums, and survives in mutated versions as part of the Sheffield pub-carolling tradition, where it is known as ‘Old Foster’ and sung to While shepherds watched their flocks by night.

SALLY DRAGE


Foster, Lawrence (Thomas)


(b Los Angeles, 23 Oct 1941). American conductor. He studied in Los Angeles, principally with Fritz Zweig, and also received important advice from Karl Böhm and Bruno Walter. His first engagement was in 1959 with the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra in Los Angeles, and he was its music director for four years. He attended the Bayreuth Festival masterclasses, 1961–3 and the Berkshire Music Center in 1966 and 1967, winning the Koussevitzky Conducting Prize in his first year there. From 1961 to 1964 he was associate conductor of the San Francisco Ballet, and from 1965 to 1968 assistant conductor of the Los Angeles PO. He made his London début conducting the English Chamber Orchestra in 1967. He first conducted the RPO in December 1968, and was its chief guest conductor from 1969 to 1974. In 1969 he shared the North American tour with Kempe; after his successful concert in Houston he was offered a series of guest engagements with the Houston SO and became its principal conductor in 1971 and music director in 1972. He conducted opera briefly at Stuttgart in 1964, and began an association with Scottish Opera in 1974. He made his Covent Garden début in 1976, conducting the revised version of Walton’s Troilus and Cressida. After resigning his Houston post in 1978, Foster concentrated his activities in Europe; he conducted the Orchestre National (now Philharmonique) de Monte Carlo from 1979 to 1990 and from 1981 to 1988 was Generalmusikdirektor in Duisburg. He was music director of the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra from 1985 to 1990, and of the Aspen Music Festival from 1990 to 1996. From 1988 to 1992 he was music director of the Jerusalem SO and in 1996 he became music director of the Barcelona SO.

Foster deals with difficult contemporary music with uncommon sympathy and skill. Among the premières he has given are Harrison Birtwistle’s Tragoedia (1965) and The Triumph of Time (1972), Alexander Goehr’s Piano Concerto (with Barenboim, 1972), and Gordon Crosse’s Symphony no.2 (1975). He is quiet and direct on the podium and inclined to understatement in his interpretations. The care with which he prepares himself is exemplary, and his performances of music in all styles are marked by rhythmic vitality and great structural intelligence.

MICHAEL STEINBERG/R



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