The Phoenix Concerts - The Phoenix Commissions

JUHI BANSAL, an Indian composer raised in Hong Kong, is currently working towards a doctorate in music composition at the University of Southern California, studying under Donald Crockett. Her previous teachers have included Erica Muhl, Frank Ticheli, Frederick Lesemann, and Stephen Hartke. Her music, with its eclectic mix of ethnic and colouristic elements, is starting to gain international acclaim. Recent performances have included her Piano Trio (played by Pacific Music Festival orchestra academy members) at Kitara hall in Sapporo, Japan, and her flute and percussion trio, T'tuooll, at the SICPP New Music festival in Boston. Recent commissions include a solo work for piano for Giorgi Latsabidze (while will be premiered in Europe in May 2009), and two multi-percussion solos for recitals at the University of Southern California. Recent awards and honours include 2009 and 2006 ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, a fellowship to attend the Pacific Music Festival, the Peter David Faith Endowed Award in Composition from USC, and scholarships from USC. wwww.juhibansal.com.

HAYES BIGGS was born in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1957 and raised in Helena, Arkansas. He holds a doctor of musical arts degree in composition from Columbia University, a master of music degree from Southern Methodist University, and a bachelor of music degree in piano performance from Rhodes College. His teachers have included Mario Davidovsky, Jack Beeson, Fred Lerdahl, Donald Erb, and Don Freund. Biggs has been a fellow in composition at the Composers Conference and Chamber Music Center at Wellesley, at the Tanglewood Music Center, at Yaddo, and at the MacDowell Colony. In 1995 he was the recipient of a Fromm Foundation Commission to compose a work for Parnassus, When you are reminded by the instruments, which was premiered by that ensemble in March 1997. He was named a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for the academic year 1998–99. Recently he was honored by an entry in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd Edition, and he was named as one of five composers to receive a 2001 Aaron Copland Award. This award carries with it the opportunity for a residency at the Aaron Copland House in upstate New York for several weeks next year, where he will be free to devote himself entirely to composition. From 1991-2001 he was associate editor at C. F. Peters Corporation, and since 1992 he has been on the faculty of Manhattan School of Music. Most recently he has been awarded a commission by the American Composers Forum and the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust to compose a group of haiku settings for the vocal quartet Kiitos. In 1993 his Mass for All Saints won a second prize in the 5e Concours International de Musique Sacrée (Festival de Musique Sacrée) in Fribourg, Switzerland. On July 3, 1994, this work received its first complete performance in Fribourg by the Choir of the North German Radio (Hamburg) under the direction of Horst Neumann. Biggs’s choral works have been performed by such distinguished ensembles as the Gregg Smith Singers, the New Calliope Singers, the New Amsterdam Singers, the New York Virtuoso Singers, Kiitos, and the Florilegium Chamber Choir. His solo vocal, instrumental, orchestral, and chamber music has been heard throughout the United States, in Europe, and in Latin America in performances by, among others, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the Riverside Symphony, the Memphis Symphony, Voices of Change, Musicians’ Accord, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Empyrean Ensemble, Parnassus, the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, and the League of Composers/ISCM. Biggs is currently at work on his first string quartet. His music is published by C. F. Peters Corporation and Margun Music, Inc. He is a member of BMI.

RUTH CUNNINGHAM is a classically trained musician and a sound healing practitioner. She combines these skills to improvise music that connects people to the healing and spiritual power of music. She is a member of the vocal quartet Anonymous 4. With them she has performed in concerts and festivals throughout the United States, Europe and the Far East and made eleven recordings. Her most recent solo recording, Light and Shadow, features her own compositions and improvisations. www.ruthcunningham.com

Composer and filmmaker JESSE DAIELLO's film Brother Reflected opened at the Freight Film Salon in Chelsea; his second feature The Caretaker, is currently in post production and also features an orchestral soundtrack conducted by the composer. His orchestral work Winter received the First Seasons Festival Composition Prize and ‘Audience Favorite’ Award during the 2008 Seasons Festival in Yakima, Washington and was subsequently premièred by the Yakima Symphony Orchestra. A student of Daron Hagen, Jesse lives in New Jersey. He will serve as Composition Program Coordinator for the 2009 Seasons Festival, and will hear his new piano trio premièred by the Finisterra Piano Trio as part of the festival. (http://www.jessedaiello.com/)

STEPHEN DEMBSKI studied piano from an early age, and was reading music long before he could read words. Warned against the clarinet on account of the braces on his teeth, and against the trombone because of the length of his arms, he took up the flute in elementary school. Later, he learned musical illiteracy: in high school and after, both in America and in England, he performed folk and traditional musics on the guitar, banjo, harmonica, and washtub bass, and played a lot of rock and roll, all "by ear." While still enrolled in college, he played flute professionally in Europe for a time, worked in a small band called Kiss that played mostly prisons in Ohio, and in a big band led by Cecil Taylor. By his early twenties, he was composing music back in the old Euro-American tradition, and eventually earned degrees in it from Antioch, SUNY-Stony Brook, and Princeton. His music -- which includes instrumental, vocal, and electro-acoustic works as well as pieces for improvising musicians and for interactive installations of sound and light -- has been broadly recognized by awards and performances in both the United States and in Europe. At home, his honors include three commission-fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, and the Goddard Lieberson Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; his Euro-American concert music has represented the United States at international festivals in France, Germany, Denmark, Poland, and England. In 1990, his orchestral setting of Wallace Stevens'last poem was recognized by the Premio Musicale Citta di Trieste (Italy) and recorded for compact disc by the Polish Radio and TV Symphony Orchestra. Other CD's include one on CRI and another on Music & Arts, both devoted solely to his music, a recording of his On Ondine released in 2001 in Italy, and a forthcoming recording of Gregory Fulkerson's performance of his violin sonata. Dembski's music has been commissioned, performed, and recorded by such organizations as the American Composers'Orchestra, the Silesian Philharmonic of Poland, The Prism Orchestra, the 20th Century Consort, the New York New Music Ensemble, and the Pro Arte Quartet, as well as by soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson, pianists Alan Feinberg and Ursula Oppens, violinist Rolf Shulte, and cellist Fred Sherry. Bernard Holland, writing in The New York Times, described his work in terms of "the sensuous, ecstatic quality of late Romanticism. As a flutist, Dembski was featured on the French radio, and played in a variety of European ensembles including the Paris-based l'Orchestre des Grands Concerts de la Sorbonne led by former Schoenberg pupil Max Deutsch. Now as both composer and improvising conductor, he is increasingly involved in working with musicians who come out of jazz, and appears on five CD's with the Scott Fields Ensemble. In connection with his work in compositional theory, he has designed a software package called Circles for composers' manipulation of a generalized framework of scalar and harmonic materials. He has also designed a software-hardware system called VIDI which transforms 3-D video information into MIDI information according to composer-defined criteria, to enable a non-intrusive interactive installation of sources of sound and light. Among other projects, he's currently working on a piece, for percussionist Daniel Druckman, to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the New York New Music Ensemble, a CD-length composition for five improvising musicians of the Scott Fields Ensemble, and an operatic setting of a libretto, Crow Soup, written for him by the renowned surrealist artist and novelist Leonora Carrington with her son, Gabriel. (www.scattershot.org/dembski/)

Composer/pianist JED DISTLER is co-founder and artistic director of ComposersCollaborative, inc, and the creator of their long-running Serial Underground series at New York's legendary Cornelia Street Café. Called "an altogether extraordinary pianist" by Michael Redmond in the Newark Star Ledger, Distler's recitals and master classes have taken him all over the US and in Europe. Recent season highlights include a newly commissioned song cycle premiered at Carnegie Hall, a duo piano collaboration with Frederic Rzewski, and a brief appearance in a BBC documentary on a major classical music scandal he helped expose. His work can be found on the Bridge, Nonesuch, Decca, Naxos, ASV and New World labels, among others. Visit (www.composerscollab.org) for the full scope of Distler's rich musical life.

Composer DANIEL FELSENFELD received his bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and went on to Boston’s New England Conservatory, where he received his doctorate in 2001. Recent commissions a 30 minute music theatre work for Sequitur; a resetting of David Bowie’s lyrics for Real Quiet with Theo Bleckmann and Petra Haden; The Poet’s Dream of Herself as a Young Girl for mezzo and piano trio to be performed at Stanford University by Amy Schneider and the Harmida Trio; and All Work and No Play, a work for piccolo and piano. His music can be found on the Endeavor and Koch imprints. Recent performances include: American Opera Projects, Jenny Lin at Bargemusic, Stephanie Mortimore at Carnegie Hall, the Syracuse Society for New Music, the Boston Modern Orchestra Projects’ Club Concert Series, Hartwell Dance Theatre, the Momenta Quartet, the Either/Or Festival, and the NewGallery Concert Series. His opera The Last of Manhattan was commissioned by (and premiered at) The Kitchen in New York City, and another of his operas, Summer and All it Brings,, was chosen to be part of New York City Opera’s VOX 2004: Showcasing American Composers. Daniel is also the author of eight books and hundreds of articles. He teaches at City College and lives in Brooklyn.

DANIEL GILLIAM is a composer of songs, choral, chamber, and orchestral works. Recent commissions and performances include "Then Sing!" for the Louisville Youth Choir’s 40th Anniversary Season and "Cakewalk" premiered by the Turin Philharmonic Orchestra of Italy. Daniel is composer-in-residence with the choir of Christ Church Cathedral in Louisville, and has been performed locally by other community ensembles. Daniel is also the station manager and afternoon host for Classical 90.5 (WUOL-FM), Louisville’s 24-hour classical public radio station.

ZACHARY GREEN (b.1993) hails from Madison, WI, and currently attends high school as a junior. As a composer, Zachary has participated in the Seasons Music Festival in Yakima, WA (2009), the New York Summer Music Festival (2008), and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Summer Music West Composition Intensive (2007). He has received guidance from composers Alexis Alrich, Chris Brubeck, Gilda Lyons, Catherine McMichael, and Daniel Ott, and currently studies under Daron Hagen. In 2008 his piece, “Suite of the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency,” won the Wisconsin School Music Association's Composition Project, and his song, “Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night,” recently had its New York première in conjunction with the Lotte Lehmann Foundation. Zachary was also recently honored with a commission from The Seasons Music Festival. At his school, Zachary is the Vice President of his graduating class, editor of the school newspaper, Vice President of the Thespian Society, and maintains a 4.0 grade point average. He has studied piano and violin for twelve and eight years, respectively.

The music of DARON ARIC HAGEN is notable for its warm lyricism, but his style defies easy categorization. While his works demonstrate fluency with a range of twentieth century compositional techniques, those procedures are secondary to his exploitation and expansion of the possibilities of tonal harmony, giving his music an immediacy that makes it appealing to a wide spectrum of audiences. His music is broadly eclectic, drawing on a variety of styles as diverse as jazz, Broadway, Latin music, Italian verismo, and soft rock. While Hagen works with consistent success in a number of genres, the foundation of his oeuvre is the art song, a form that highlights his melodic and dramatic talents, exemplified by "Dear Youth" (based on American Civil War stories) and "Songs of Madness and Sorrow." His teacher Ned Rorem famously stated of him, "Daron is music."  Born in Milwaukee in 1961, Hagen began his musical studies at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, continuing his education at the University of Wisconsin, the Curtis Institute of Music, and the Juilliard School. Hagen's teachers include such prominent composers as Ned Rorem, Joseph Schwantner, David Diamond, Witold Lutoslawski, and Leonard Bernstein. Already known for song cycles composed in the 1980s that demonstrated his gift for lyrical and dramatically astute text setting, Hagen turned to opera with "Shining Brow" (1990-1992), a musical evocation of the life of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, with a libretto by poet Paul Muldoon. Other stage works include "Vera of Las Vegas" (a "nightmare cabaret opera"), "Bandanna" (an opera scored for wind ensemble, loosely based on Othello), and he has received a commission from the Seattle Opera for a new work, "Amelia." Other commissions include pieces for the New York Philharmonic, the Curtis Institute of Music, the University of Wisconsin, the King's Singers, pianist Gary Graffman, violinist Jaime Laredo, and cellist Sharon Robinson.   In the late '80s and throughout the '90s, Hagen gained a reputation as an enthusiastic mentor, teaching at Princeton University, the Curtis Institute, Bard College, New York University, and the City College of New York. Hagen's numerous honors and awards include the Bearns Prize from Columbia University, the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Opera America's "Next Stage" Award, two Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residencies, and the Barlow International Composition Prize for Chamber Music. © Copyright 2009 All Media Guide LLC, reprinted by permission

PAULA M. KIMPER, b. 1956, is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music and has been active in New York City for 30 years as a composer of opera, theater, dance, film and song. Ms. Kimper’s first opera, "Patience & Sarah," received its world premiere in Lincoln Center Festival '98, and was most recently produced in Oakland, California. "The Captivation of Eunice Williams," commissioned by the PVMA of Deerfield, MA, premiered in July 2004, and was most recently performed in Skopje, Macedonia, in an historic co-production of the Albanian National Theater Company and the Macedonian Philharmonic Orchestra. Ms. Kimper is at work on a new opera called "TRUTH" based on the life of Sojourner Truth. She has received commissions from The Phoenix Concerts, Old Deerfield Productions, Amy Pivar Dances, Richard Daniels, Downtown Music Productions, The Walt Whitman Project, American Opera Projects, and others. The composer is grateful for the generous support of American Opera Projects, American Music Center, International Music and Art Foundation, Lincoln Center Festival, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Meet the Composer, Old Deerfield Productions, Opera America, and Theatre Communications Group. www.paulakimper.com

ERIC MOE (b. 1954), composer of what the NY Times calls "music of winning exuberance", has received numerous grants and awards for his work, including the Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship; commissions from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Fromm Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, and Meet-the-Composer USA; fellowships from the Wellesley Composer's Conference and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Bellagio, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Montana Artists Refuge, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, and the American Dance Festival. His sit-trag/one-woman opera Tri-Stan was hailed by the New York Times in 2005 as “a blockbuster” and “a tour de force”, a work of “inspired weight” that “subversively inscribe[s] classical music into pop culture”. In its review of the piece, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette concluded, “it is one of those rare works that transcends the cultural divide while still being rooted in both sides.” Moe studied composition at Princeton University (A.B.) and at the University of California at Berkeley (M.A., Ph.D.). He is currently Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh and has held visiting professorships at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania. www.ericmoe.net

DAPHNA MOR has performed throughout Europe and the United States as a soloist and as an ensemble player. Her appearances include solo recitals in Croatia, Germany and Switzerland; recitals at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Trinity Church, New York; and appearances as soloist with The New York Collegium (Andrew Parrot, conductor); the New York Early Music Ensemble (Fred Renz conductor); and at Carnegie Hall with Little Orchestra Society. She has served as an orchestra member with the New York Philharmonic (Allen Gilbert, conductor); City Opera, Mostly Mozart, Lincoln Center; and Piffaro, The Renaissance Band and Repast. Awards include First Prize in Settimane Musicali di Lugano Solo Competition and two times winner of The Boston Conservatory Concerto Competition. Ms. Mor is actively involved in performing contemporary music. This season she was featured as a soloist with the The Metropolis Ensemble, performing the world premiere of ‘Tears, Puffes, Jumps, and Galliard’ by David Bruce. In 2009 she joined St Luck’s Orchestra to perform the NY premiere of ‘The Flowering Tree” composed and conducted by John Adams. Ms. Mor received her Bachelor of Music degree from The Boston Conservatory with highest honors as Valedictorian of the class of 2000. She acts as musician to the education department of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and is a frequent teacher of early music workshops around the US. Ms. Mor is an active World Music musician as well. She has appeared on such prestigious stages as Summer Stage, Central Park, NY, and in festivals all over the Unites States, Canada, Poland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Slovenia, Austria, Greece and Israel. Ms. Mor appears on Sting’s latest CD "If On a Winter’s Night" on the Deutsche Gramophone label. She is a musician at residence at B’nai Jeshurun Synagogue in New York City. www.daphnamor.com

DAVID RAKOWSKI grew up in St.Albans, Vermont and studied at New England Conservatory, Princeton, and Tanglewood, where his teachers were Robert Ceely, John Heiss, Milton Babbitt, Paul Lansky, and Luciano Berio. He has received a large number of awards and fellowships, including the Elise L. Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Rome Prize, and he has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music (for pieces commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the US Marine Band). He has composed five concertos, three symphonies, 97 piano etudes, five song cycles, and a large amount of wind ensemble music, chamber music, and vocal music for various combinations, as well as music for children. His music has been commissioned, recorded, and performed widely and is published by C.F. Peters. He is currently the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Composition at Brandeis University, having also taught at New England Conservatory, Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford.

JESSICA RUDMAN has written music for the concert hall, dance, and film, which has been performed across the United States and abroad. She has participated in festivals such as the Wintergreen Summer Music Festival, the Electro-Acoustic Juke Joint, the European American Musical Alliance, Nevada Encounters of New Music, and the Bard Conductor’s Institute. Recently, her work Napoleon Complex was awarded first prize in the Con/un/drum Percussion Competition. Other honors include winning the 2008 Omaha Symphony New Music Symposium Score Call, receiving a WELFund Grant from the University of Hartford, and invitations to give paper presentations at the annual meetings of the New England Conference of Music Theorists, the West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis, and the SCI Region V conference. In addition to being an active composer and theorist, Ms. Rudman is involved in the community as an educator, currently serving on the faculty of The Hartt School and Central Connecticut State University. She is also a member of the new music ensemble, The Hartford Sound Alliance, and a board member for the Connecticut-based Studio of Electronic Music, Inc. (www.jessicarudman.com)

FAYE-ELLEN SILVERMAN began her music studies before the age of four at the Dalcroze School of Music. She first achieved national recognition by winning the Parents League Competition, judged by Leopold Stokowski, at the age of 13. She holds a BA from Barnard, cum laude and honors in music, and an AM from Harvard and a DMA from Columbia, both in music composition. She spent her junior year of college at Mannes College. Her teachers have included Otto Luening, William Sydeman, Leon Kirchner, Lukas Foss, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and Jack Beeson. Seesaw Music, a division of Subito Music, publishes about 75 of her compositions. Zigzags is available on Crystal Records, Taming the Furies is available on Capstone, and Passing Fancies, Restless Winds, and Speaking Alone are on New World Recordings. An entire CD of her chamber works has recently been released by Albany Records. Silverman's awards include the selection of her Oboe-sthenics to represent the United States at the International Rostrum of Composers/UNESCO, resulting in international radio broadcasts (1982); winning the Indiana State [Orchestral] Composition Contest, resulting in a performance by the Indianapolis Symphony (1982); a Governor's Citation (1982); and having September 30, 1982 named Faye-Ellen Silverman Day in Baltimore by Mayor Donald Schaeffer. Additionally, she has been the recipient of the National League of American Pen Women’s biennial music award (2002), yearly Standard Awards from ASCAP (now known as ASCAPlus) since 1983, several Meet the Composer grants, and an American Music Center grant. She has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2007), a resident scholar at the Villa Serbelloni of the Rockefeller Foundation (1987), a Composers' Conference Fellow (1985), a Yaddo Fellow (1984), and a MacDowell Fellow (1982). She is currently a Founding Board Member of the International Women's Brass Conference (for which she has served as composer-in-residence), and a founding member of Music Under Construction, a composers’ collective.

LARRY ALAN SMITH has developed an international reputation as a composer, performer, educator and arts executive. Many of today’s outstanding soloists, chamber ensembles and orchestras have performed and commissioned works by Larry Alan Smith. Upon hearing the world premiere of his one-act opera, "Aria da Capo", the well-known Chicago-based critic, Claudia Cassidy, reported: "This is remarkable opera theatre…Smith has an ear for flaring brilliance… All this seems to me a true talent, primarily because I want to hear Aria da Capo again." Larry Alan Smith is represented and published by the Theodore Presser Company. His works are also published by Bourne Music, E.B. Marks, Colla Voce Music, and Tallow Tree Music Publishing; and his vocal works are distributed by Classical Vocal Reprints.

Born on April 18, 1982, DENNIS TOBENSKI grew up in Kankakee, IL. In 2004, he graduated from Illinois State University, where he studied Vocal Performance with baritone John M. Koch, and Music Theory & Composition with composers Stephen Andrew Taylor, David Feurzeig and Serra Hwang. After finishing his Bachelor's degree, Dennis moved to New York City, where he studied privately for nearly three years with composer Daron Aric Hagen. Dennis completed his Master of Arts degree in Composition at the City College of New York, where he studied with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici.Dennis has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Prairie Center of the Arts, the Ucross Foundation, and the Staunton Music Festival, and has had works performed by such ensembles as Percussia, The IonSound Project, the Illinois State University Madrigal Singers, the ISU Concert Choir, and members of the United States Coast Guard Band.Current and recent commissions include: echoes (2008) for soprano and piano on poetry by Mark Statman, commissioned by the Staunton Music Festival in Staunton, VA; at least a moment (2008-2009) for soprano and harp, and plenty of time for soprano, baritone, and harp, on poetry by Kenneth Koch, commissioned by harpist Megan Sesma and soprano Patricia Schuman; a new work for piccolo trumpet and string quartet, commissioned by trumpet player David Glukh; a new work for violin and piano (2010), commissioned by violinist Roger Zahab; Take All My Loves (2009), commissioned by Dr. Karyl Carlson and the Illinois State University Concert Choir; and Best at Dawn (2010) for pianist Marc Peloquin.

The music of composer/pianist CRAIG URQUHART (pronounced "irk-hart ") is a continuing renewal of faith in beauty and the healing power of music. Urquhart's timeless sound and compositional focus has gradually shifted from academic classical music to a more lyrical personal voice. His music draws upon the influence of such iconic keyboard composers as Chopin, Debussy, Satie and Copland, but Urquhart also considers pop/rock musicians as creative influences. His contemporary voice is both a reflection of our times and a commentary on humanity's need for refuge. Urquhart's love of the piano began at age six, when he began taking piano lessons as a child growing up in Michigan; however he credits Leonard Bernstein’s CBS series The Young People's Concerts with The New York Philharmonic as "literally educating a whole generation of kids about music, including myself." Moving to New York City after receiving his Master’s in Composition from the University of Michigan, Urquhart left some of his music with Bernstein's Manhattan doorman; the Maestro called Urquhart back, and the two became acquainted. In 1985 Urquhart was hired as Bernstein’s musical assistant, and worked for Bernstein until the composer’s death in 1990. He also served for many years as a member of the music faculty at the Harlem School of the Arts, and was actor Tom Hulce's musical coach for the Academy Award winning film Amadeus. He is a member of ASCAP, serves on the Board of Directors of the Lotte Lehmann Foundation, is a Whisperings Artist and is a voting member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (The Grammys). Urquhart is also a well-known composer of art songs, including musical settings of poems by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. His songs have been performed and recorded by Thomas Hampson, Michael Slattery, Lauren Wagner, and other artists. His new art song album - Secret and Divine Signs with tenor Michael Slattery has received critical acclaim receiving five stars from both the BBC Music Magazine and Classic FM Magazine.

At the forefront of a new wave of Chinese-American composers, WANG JIE has emerged as a distinctive musical voice. Elegant and elementally clear, her works are powerfully engaging, richly orchestrated and rhythmically vibrant. She spins a few notes into large music forms a rare trait in today's composers. The New York Times calls her work "introspective" and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review describes it as "scrupulously crafted composition that embraces both Chinese and Western modern classical expression."

BETH WIEMANN was raised in Burlington, VT and studied composition and clarinet at Oberlin College and Princeton University. Her works have been performed by the New York New Music Ensemble, Continuum, Parnassus, Earplay, the Buffalo New Music Ensemble, Washington Square Contemporary Players, ALEA III, singers Paul Hillier, Susan Narucki, D’Anna Fortunato and others. Her compositions have won awards from the Orvis Foundation, Colorado New Music Festival, American Women Composers, and Marimolin as well as various arts councils. She teaches composition and clarinet at the University of Maine. Beth splits her time between Maine and Massachusetts, where her husband, composer David Rakowski, teaches at Brandeis University.

PETER WINKLER is a composer, pianist, and Professor of music at Stony Brook University, where he has taught since 1971. His compositions include both concert works and music for the theater; many of his pieces explore connections between popular and classical idioms. As a pianist, he appears with Rhoda Levine’s opera improvisation group, Play It By Ear, and with his wife, violinist Dorothea Cook, in the duo Silken Rags. Peter Winkler’s research and teaching is focused on the history and theory of popular music.

ROGER ZAHAB instigates complex relations through his activities as composer, violinist, conductor, teacher and writer. He has written much chamber, vocal and orchestral music in addition to work in dance, theater and video. Recently, recordings on Albany Records have been made of "levitation of pianos" during a waltz played by pianist Eric Moe, and "Earth’s Jig" and "Silence Orchids" played by pianist Bennett Lerner. Recent works include "ardent life" for trumpet and orchestra, and "Ohio entelechron", a multi-media performance work which uses various kinds of Time to explore the connections between identity, history and community. www.rogerzahab.net