SIEGFRIED NAUMANN was born in Malmö on 27th November 1919 and died there on 13th June 2001.
He studied at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm from 1942 to 1945 and continued his studies at the Mozarteum in Saltzburg during the summer of 1949 and at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome from 1949 to 1954. His composition teachers included Ildebrando Pizzetti and Francesco Malipiero and as a conductor he studied with Tor Mann, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Hermann Schmeidel and Hermann Scherchen among others. He was the conductor of the Örnsköldsvik Orchestral Society from 1945 to 1948. He also conducted in Italy, England and Germany and the most famous orchestras in Scandinavia. In 1962 he founded ”Musica Nova”, an ensemble that focused on contemporary repertoire, which he led until 1977. From 1963 to 1983 he taught conducting at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm where he was made a professor in 1976. He is the author of the book Studier för unga dirigenter och andra interpreter (”Studies for Young Conductors and Other Interpreters”) and he was the editor of Tor Mann’s analyses of Sibelius’ symphonies. In 1991 he received the Christ Johnson Major Award as well as the Kurt Atterberg Prize.

Any attempt at summarising Siegfried Naumann’s personality and achievement is bound to look rather like a straitjacket, because of the elusive sparkle of his intellect and the interminable changeability of his musical imagination. In his church music we meet an intensity transmitted in the radiance of a sensuously ardent musicality. In his chamber and orchestral music he acted on a deep and confident understanding of the multifariously living texture of sound. From the crystal brightness of aphoristically terse phrases to undulating expanses of colour in great developments of form. His interest focused on polyphony, melodic variation and rhythmic diversification. In other words, his compositions combine a wealth of technical diversity with a variety of creative temperament. As leader of the “Musica Nova“ group he broadened the range of his ideas through the addition of ideas concerning the nature of practical musicality. What he seeked to achieve was not a superficial musikanterei but the natural balance between inward awareness and trained craftsmanship. Naumann’s dual personality as a conscientious craftsman and unpredictable artist of impulse is excitingly and strikingly apparent in one of most grandly conceived works, Flores sententiarum (1983/84). H-GP (rev. 2001)