Danish composer Poul Ruders was born in 1949 in Ringsted, Denmark, and studied piano and organ before eventually studying orchestration with the Danish composer Karl Aage Rasmussen. Ruders’s first compositions date from the mid-60s and he has written in a wide variety of styles, from the Vivaldi pastiche of his first violin concerto (1981) to the modernism of Manhattan Abstraction (1982). His large body of music includes opera (such as his highly successful The Handmaid’s Tale) and orchestral works, as well as chamber, vocal and solo music.
