Elisabetta Brusa (born 1954) is an Italian composer.

Brusa was born in Milan, and as a child wrote a couple dozen piano pieces. At the Milan Conservatory she formally studied composition with Bruno Bertinelli, (who also taught famous Italian conductors like Claudio Abbado and Riccardo Muti), graduating in 1980, and started teaching there the same year. She also received instruction from Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Hans Keller .

After winning first prize at the Washington International Competition for Composition for String Quartet in 1982, she was awarded the Fromm Fellowship and the Fulbright Fellowship the next year and Fellowships from the MacDowell Colony later in the decade. She married the conductor Gilberto Serembe .

Currently she is best known for her orchestral works recorded in two volumes on the Naxos label. This includes the tone poem Florestan, based on the Florestan side of Robert Schumann's personality (though in some ways it is more redolent of Mahler); the Nittemero Symphony, inspired by ancient Greek astronomy; the tone poem Messidor, which alludes strongly to (without actually quoting) Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream (the work is dedicated to her husband), and a Fanfare among others.

Brusa describes her musical style as "close to Neo-Tonality and in particular to Neo-Romanticism, but in the original sense of the word, which is often confusedly assimilated to the other ones," and her harmony as "essentially pandiatonic with panchromatic moments."

External Links

• elisabettabrusa.it