From Musica Baltica http://www.musicabaltica.com/en/autori/297/piezimes/ Arturs Maskats was born on December 20th, 1957 in Valmiera. He studied at the Jāzeps Mediņš Music School, where among his teachers were Jānis Līcītis (harmony) and Marija Mediņa (the musical form, instrumentation) – a representative of a notable family of Latvian composers and the spiritual motivator of Arturs Maskats’s further progress. He finished the composition class with Valentīns Utkins (1982) at the Latvian State Conservatory, and, during his years of study, he received the top award at the All Nations Young Composer Festival (1981) in Yerevan, Armenia. The focus of the composer’s creative life is the theatre. As the Music Director at the Rainis Dailes Theatre (1982–1997) he composed original music for almost one hundred productions, among them the distinguished Reawakening Period production Mūžības skartie (Those Touched by Eternity) (1987) by Aleksandrs Čaks, which poet Jānis Peters called that era’s purification. Arturs Maskats composed for other theatres’ productions too. He was the chairman of the executive board of the Latvian Composer’s Union (1993–1996), and as of 1996 is the artistic director of the Latvian National Opera. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.