Kinan Azmeh

Composer

Born in Damascus, Kinan was the first Arab to win the premier prize at the 1997 Nicolai Rubinstein International Competition, Moscow. A graduate of New York’s Juilliard school as a student of Charles Neidich, and of both the Damascus High institute of Music where he studied with Shukry Sahwki, Nicolay Viovanof and Anatoly Moratof, and Damascus University’s School of Electrical Engineering. Kinan earned his doctorate degree in music from the City University of New York in 2013.

Kinan has appeared worldwide as a soloist, composer and improviser. Notable appearances include: Opera Bastille, Paris; Tchaikovsky Grand Hall, Moscow; Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall and the UN’s general assembly, New York; the Royal Albert hall, London; Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires; der Philharmonie; Berlin; the Library of Congress, the Kennedy Center, Washington DC; the Mozarteum, Salzburg and the Damascus opera house for its opening concert in his native Syria.

He has appeared as soloist with the Bavarian radio orchestra, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the NDR big-band, the Kiev Camerata, the Knights Orchestra, the Izmir State Opera Orchestra, the Corasara Orchestra, the Osnabruck Symphony, the Morgenland Festival Orchestra, the Qatar Philharmonic , the New Juilliard Ensemble and the Syrian Symphony Orchestra among others.; and has shared the stage with Yo-Yo Ma, Marcel Khalife, Aynur, Daniel Barenboim, Jivan Gasparian, Zakir Hussein Francois Rabbath, Simon Shaheen, Solhi-al-Wadi, Calefax Reed Quintet, and members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, among others.

His compositions include several works for solo, orchestra, and chamber music; film, live illustration, and electronics. His discography include three albums with his ensemble HEWAR, several soundtracks for film and dance, a duo album with pianist Dinuk Wijeratne and a recent album with his New York Arabic/Jazz quartet. He serves as artistic director of the Damascus Festival Chamber Music Ensemble, with whom he released an album of new contemporary Syrian chamber music written especially for the ensemble by various composers and is also a frequent guest faculty at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music and is on the advisory board of the Nova Scotia Youth Orchestra. He is also a member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble.

Eve Beglarian

Composer

According to the Los Angeles Times, composer and performer Eve Beglarian “is a humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist.” A 2017 winner of the Alpert Award in the Arts for her “prolific, engaging and surprising body of work,” she has also been awarded the 2015 Robert Rauschenberg Prize from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts for her “innovation, risk-taking, and experimentation.”

Beglarian’s current projects include a collaboration with writer/performer Karen Kandel about women in Vicksburg from the Civil War to the present, a piece about the controversial Balthus painting Thérèse Dreaming for vocalist Lucy Dhegrae, and a duo for uilleann pipes and organ that was premiered by Renée Louprette and Ivan Goff at Disney Hall as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 100th anniversary celebrations. Since 2001, she has been creating A Book of Days, “a grand and gradually manifesting work in progress…an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements.” (Los Angeles Times)

In 2009, “Ms. Beglarian kayaked and bicycled the length of the Mississippi River [and] has translated her findings into music of sophisticated rusticity… [Her] new Americana song cycle captures those swift currents as vividly as Mark Twain did. The works waft gracefully on her handsome folk croon and varied folk instrumentation as mysterious as their inspiration.” (New York Times)

Beglarian’s chamber, choral, and orchestral music has been commissioned and widely performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the American Composers Orchestra, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the California EAR Unit, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Sequitur, loadbang, the Guidonian Hand, Newspeak, the Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble and individual performers including Maya Beiser, Sarah Cahill, Lauren Flanigan, Marya Martin, and Mary Rowell.

Highlights of Beglarian’s work in music theater includes music for Mabou Mines’ Obie-winning Dollhouse, Animal Magnetism, Ecco Porco, Choephorai, and Shalom Shanghai, all directed by Lee Breuer; Forgiveness, a collaboration with Chen Shi-Zheng and Noh master Akira Matsui; and the China National Beijing Opera Theater’s production of The Bacchae, also directed by Chen Shi-Zheng.

She has collaborated with choreographers including Ann Carlson, Robert LaFosse, Victoria Marks, Susan Marshall, David Neumann, Take Ueyama, and Megan Williams, and with visual and video artists including Cory Arcangel, Anne Bray, Vittoria Chierici, Barbara Hammer, Kevork Mourad, Shirin Neshat, Matt Petty, Bradley Wester, and Judson Wright.

Performance projects include Brim, Songs from a Book of Days, The Story of B, Open Secrets, Hildegurls’ Ordo Virtutum, twisted tutu, and typOpera.

Recordings of Eve’s music are available on ECM, Koch, New World, Canteloupe, Innova, Naxos, Kill Rock Stars, CDBaby, and Bandcamp.

Conrad Cummings

Composer

A versatile composer on the faculty of the Juilliard School Evening Division, Conrad Cummings writes operas, instrumental music, and music for amplified instruments and voices. His work is heard in venues from Carnegie Hall and BAM to alternative clubs (le) Poisson Rouge and The Knitting Factory.

Opera productions range from the three-act, large-forces exploration of the Vietnam War Tonkin, commissioned and premiered by Opera Delaware, to a three-week Off-Broadway run of the electoral campaign opera Photo-Op by Ridge Theater at New York’s legendary La Mama ETC.

Honors include selection of The Golden Gate as one of Opera News Magazine’s “Best New Operas of the 21st Century,” fellowships to the MacDowell and Djerassi Foundations, and grants from the NEA, Opera America, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Viet Cuong

Composer

Called “alluring” and “wildly inventive” by The New York Times, the music of American composer Viet Cuong has been performed on six continents by musicians and ensembles such as Sō Percussion, Eighth Blackbird, Alarm Will Sound, PRISM Quartet, Albany Symphony, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and Minnesota Orchestra, among many others. Viet’s music has been featured in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Kennedy Center, and his works for wind ensemble have amassed hundreds of performances worldwide.

Passionate about bringing these different facets of the contemporary music community together, his upcoming projects include a concerto for Eighth Blackbird with the United States Navy Band and a Sousa-inspired work for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Viet also enjoys exploring the unexpected and whimsical, and he is often drawn to projects where he can make peculiar combinations and sounds feel enchanting or oddly satisfying. His recent works thus include a snare drum solo, percussion quartet concerto, and, most recently, a double oboe concerto.

Currently the 2020 Early Career Musician-in-Residence at the Dumbarton Oaks, he was recently appointed the California Symphony’s 2020-2023 Young American Composer-in-Residence.

Viet holds degrees from the Curtis Institute of Music (AD), Princeton University (MFA), and Peabody Conservatory (BM/MM).

Brooke Joyce

Composer

Brooke Joyce’s music has been described as “vividly pictorial” (San Francisco Chronicle) and “exceptionally gripping” (Los Angeles Times) and has been performed by soloists and ensembles around the world, including the Indianapolis Symphony, the Cincinnati Symphony, the St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic, the Brentano Quartet, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Nash Ensemble, and James Gilchrist. In addition to his concert music, Brooke collaborated on several musical theater works with playwright Frederick Gaines, including Unbekannt, a musical based on the life of the famous Anastasia pretender Anna Anderson, and An Imaginary Line, based on the book Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer.

A CD of his chamber music, Waves of Stone, was released on the Innova label in 2009, and according to MusicWeb International, features “dramatic pieces which are rhythmically energetic, with … a sense of underlying strength of will.”

Brooke is the recipient of the Joseph Bearns Prize, the Wayne Peterson Prize, the Darius Milhaud Award, and many citations from the National Federation of Music Clubs and ASCAP. He earned degrees in composition from Princeton University, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and Lawrence University, and attended summer courses with Joan Tower, Magnus Lindberg, and Alun Hoddinott.

Brooke is the Composer-in-Residence at Luther College and a faculty member at the International Music Festival of the Adriatic. He lives with his wife, Jennifer, and sons Keegan and Kyle, in a quiet neighborhood in Decorah, a small town in northeast Iowa.

Thomas Oboe Lee

Composer

Thomas Oboe Lee has proven a very prolific composer. He has four symphonies to his name and a number of miscellaneous orchestral pieces that aren’t quite tone poems, but do not fall easily into any other category. Titles invoking mythology or traditional Latin nomenclature — like Euridice, Jubilatus, Cavatina Cavadini, String Quartet No. 3 (…Child of Uranus, father of Zeus), or Flauta Carioca — are common throughout his catalog. Other pieces, like the chamber work The Mad Frog for oboe, bass clarinet, and harp, or I’ve Got the Munchies for violin duo, bass clarinet, and vibraphone, go by more fanciful names.

Those few of Lee’s pieces that are assigned traditional, basic names — like the symphonies — seem almost invariably to bear pictorial or literary subtitles: Fallen Angels for Symphony No. 1 of 1993 – 1995, A Phantasmagorey Ballet for 1998’s Symphony No. 2, the ambitious War and Peace for Symphony No. 4 of 2001.

Lee loves the string quartet and has also written better than a dozen pieces for singer or singers and ensemble, one of which is the chamber opera Unmasked (1990). Several major organizations, including Amnesty International, the Koussevitsky Foundation, and the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston, have commissioned works from Lee and with more and more performing bodies — like the American and Kronos quartets and the American Jazz Philharmonic — jumping onto the Lee bandwagon, there seems little chance that he will slow the pace of his pen in the near future.

Jessie Montgomery

Composer

Jessie Montgomery is a violinist, composer and music educator from New York City. She performs and gives workshops in the US and abroad and her compositions are being performed by orchestras and chamber groups throughout the country.

Jessie was born and raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1980s during a time when the neighborhood was at a major turning point in its history. Artists gravitated there and it was a hotbed of cultural activity and community development. Her parents (father a musician, her mother, an actress) were engaged in the activities of the neighborhood and regularly brought Jessie to rallies, performances and parties where neighbors, activists and artists gathered to celebrate and support the movements of the time. It is from this unique experience that Jessie has created a life in which performance, creativity, education and advocacy merge.

Jessie began her violin studies, at the Third Street Music School Settlement, one of the oldest community organizations in the country. Upon graduating with her Bachelor’s degree from the Juilliard School in Violin Performance in 2003, she joined forces with Community MusicWorks in Providence, Rhode Island, a nationally recognized leader in community development and music education. With this appointment came her first experience as a professional chamber musician as a member of the Providence String Quartet. She continued her chamber music endeavors as a founding member of PUBLIQuartet, a string quartet made up of composers and arrangers, featuring their own music as well as that of emerging and established contemporary composers. Since 2012 she has held post as a member of the highly acclaimed Catalyst Quartet, raved by the New York Times as “invariably energetic and finely burnished…performing with earthly vigor”, touring regularly in the United States and abroad. Most recently she has become a collaborator with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad Ensemble and will tour with them in the upcoming 2018-19 season.

Since 1999, Jessie has been affiliated with The Sphinx Organization, which supports the accomplishments of young African-American and Latino string players. As a member of the Sphinx network she has played numerous roles within the organization, as a teacher, juror, orchestra member and concertmaster, panelist and ambassador, as well as being a two-time laureate in their annual competition. Jessie was also Composer-in-Residence with the Sphinx Virtuosi, a conductor-less string orchestra which toured her music for 3 seasons. The tours resulted in radio broadcasts on Performance Today, WFMT in Chicago, Q2 and others, and a review in the Washington Post calling her music “Turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life.” In 2014, Jessie was awarded Sphinx’s generous MPower grant to assist in the recording of her acclaimed debut album, Strum: Music for Strings (October, 2015, Azica Records). The Whole Note states that the album displays “a remarkable self-assurance and confidence together with a striking musical inventiveness and imagination”; and Second Inversion, Seattle’s alternative classical radio station, remarks that “The album combines classical chamber music with elements of folk music, spirituals, improvisation, poetry and politics, crafting a unique and insightful new-music perspective on the cross-cultural intersections of American history.”

In 2012, Jessie completed her graduate degree in Composition for Film and Multimedia at New York University, at which point composing became a true focus on her path. Opportunities came about to partner with the American Composers Orchestra, the Sphinx Organization and chamber groups throughout New York City. Other commissions began to emerge from the Albany Symphony, the Joyce Foundation, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and the Young People’s Chorus of NY.

In fall 2018, Jessie will be an incoming Virginia B.Toulmin Fellow at the Centre for Ballet and the Arts, where she will complete work on a new ballet for Dance Theater of Harlem and the Virginia Arts Festival, in collaboration with choreographer Claudia Schreier. Other upcoming highlights include premieres of new work for soprano Julia Bullock, The Muir Quartet and performances by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

Teachers and mentors include Sally Thomas, Ann Setzer, Alice Kanack, Joan Tower, Derek Bermel, Mark Suozzo, Ira Newborn and Laura Kaminsky.

Mark O’Connor

Composer

Mark O’Connor began his creative journey at the feet of American fiddling legend Benny Thomasson, and the iconic French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli. Now, at age 55, he has melded these influences into a new American classical music, and is perpetuating his vision of an American School of String Playing. Mr. O’Connor has won three Grammys, seven CMA awards as well as several national fiddle, guitar and mandolin champion titles. His distinguished career includes representing the United States Information Agency in cultural diplomacy to six continents and performing in front of several U.S. presidents including being invited to the White House by President Ronald Reagan to perform as a teen.

After recording a series of albums for Rounder and Warner Bros including his multiple Grammy-winning New Nashville Cats, his recordings for Sony Classical with Yo-Yo Ma, Appalachia Waltz and Appalachian Journey sold a million CDs and gained O’Connor worldwide recognition as a leading proponent of a new American musical idiom.

Mr. O’Connor’s Fiddle Concerto released on Warner Bros. has become the most-performed violin concerto composed in the last 50 years. On his own OMAC Records label, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra recorded his sweeping Americana Symphony while his groundbreaking 9^th concerto, The Improvised Violin Concerto was recorded in Boston Symphony Hall. His new touring group, the Mark O’Connor Band consisting of family members (wife, son and daughter-in-law) debuted at #1 on Billboard Magazine’s bluegrass album chart and their first album Coming Home won a Grammy in 2017. Mr. O’Connor is set to release his 47^th feature album on June 7, 2017, an exciting new CD, Mark O’Connor Band Live!

Mr. O’Connor has authored a series of educational books called the O’Connor Method and is now the fastest growing violin method in the country and tens of thousands can credit the O’Connor books for learning how to play stringed instruments. The O’Connor Method features American music styles, creativity, cultural diversity and western classical technical training. Mr. O’Connor currently is artist-in-residence with the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, touring nationally with the Mark O’Connor Band and resides in North Carolina with his wife, fellow bandmate and duo partner Maggie O’Connor. For more information, please see www.markoconnor.com, www.oconnormethod.com, and www.markoconnorband.com.

Fred Rzewski

Composer

A highly respected composer and pianist, Frederic Rzewski is recognized both for his innovative works and for his strong political convictions.

A founding member of the groundbreaking improvisational collective MEV, Rzewski’s pieces often bridge the gap between classical music and avant-garde jazz. In The People United Will Never Be Defeated, arguably his most well-known piece, and in many other compositions, Rzewski has drawn on folk songs, narratives and politically charged texts to issue musical calls for social change.

While Rzewski’s unorthodox approach to performance and composition, as well as his political consciousness, was clearly influenced by the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1960s, his work remains equally relevant in the new millennium.

In 2005 the Boston Globe‘s David Weininger called him “one of the most prominent living American composers and a prodigiously talented pianist.”

Gilles Silvestrini

Composer

Gilles Silvestrini is a living composer and oboist based in Paris, France, best known for his contemporary compositions for oboe. He also has written works for various other instruments, chamber groups and a few concertos. Silvestrini was born on June 4, 1961 in Givet, France, a commune in northern France close to the Belgian border. Silvestrini studied oboe at the National Conservatory of Music and Dance in Paris, where he won first oboe prize in 1985. He then went on to study composition from 1986 to 1988 at the Ècole Normale de Musique. His works for the oboe are often used for competition pieces, such as the International Double Reed Society Gillet Competition and entrance exams or auditions for some of the most prestigious universities and conservatories around the world including the National Superior Conservatory of Music and Dance of Lyon, and the Lynn University Conservatory of Music.

Gilles Silvestrini’s compositions for the oboe have been sought after because of their virtuosic nature, a good method to test advanced oboists technical abilities and as an option for an unaccompanied programmatic etude in a recital setting. One of his most famous works is the “Six Etudes for Solo Oboe,” which is a set of concert etudes each inspired and named after a specific French impressionistic painting. Oboists often play these works in competitions and recitals, however they are not often presented with any representation of the paintings to which they correspond. Many of Silvestrini’s other works take inspiration from various composers, artists, and poets.

Dinuk Wijeratne

Composer

Sri Lankan-born Canadian Dinuk Wijeratne is a JUNO and multi-award-winning composer, conductor, and pianist who has been described by the Toronto Star as ‘an artist who reflects a positive vision of our cultural future’, and by the New York Times as ‘exuberantly creative’. His boundary-crossing work sees him equally at home in collaborations with symphony orchestras and string quartets, tabla players and DJs, and takes him to international venues as poles apart as the Berlin Philharmonie and the North Sea Jazz Festival. Dinuk was featured as a main character in What would Beethoven do? – the documentary about innovation in Classical music featuring Eric Whitacre, Bobby McFerrin and Ben Zander.

Dinuk made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2004 as a composer, conductor, and pianist, performing with Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. A second Carnegie appearance followed in 2009, alongside tabla legend Zakir Hussain. Dinuk has also appeared at the Kennedy Center (Washington DC), Opera Bastille (Paris), Lincoln Center (New York), Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires), Sri Lanka, Japan, and across the Middle East.

Dinuk grew up in Dubai before taking up composition studies at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM), Manchester, UK. In 2001, he was invited by Oscar-winning composer John Corigliano to join his studio at New York’s Juilliard School. Conducting studies followed at New York’s Mannes College of Music under David Hayes, and doctoral studies at the University of Toronto under Christos Hatzis.

Dinuk has composed specially for almost all of the artists and ensembles with whom he has shared the stage; to name a few: Suzie LeBlanc, Sandeep Das, Kinan Azmeh, James Ehnes, Andrew Armstrong, Bev Johnston, Tim Garland, John Dankworth, Nikki Iles, Julian Argüelles, Victor Mendoza, Buck 65, Skratch Bastid, Joseph Petric, Nick Halley, Ed Thigpen, Pandit Ramesh Misra, Adrian Spillett, David Jalbert, Kevork Mourad, Mayookh Bhaumik, Yolande Bavan, Christina Courtin, MIR, the Afiara & Cecelia String Quartets, the Apollo Saxophone Quartet, TorQ & 4-Mality Percussion Quartets, McGill Percussion Ensemble, the New Juilliard Ensemble, Onelight Theatre, Symphony Nova Scotia, and the orchestras of Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Buffalo, Illinois, Fresno, Windsor, and KwaZulu Natal (South Africa).

Dinuk is also a creativity consultant, and works with private clients as well as the Rebanks Fellows of Toronto’s Glenn Gould School.

A passionate educator, Dinuk is a founding faculty member at the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance (LAMP), and enjoyed a 13-year tenure as Music Director of the Nova Scotia Youth Orchestra. He is the recipient of the Canada Council Jean-Marie Beaudet award for orchestral conducting; the NS Established Artist Award; NS Masterworks nominations for his Tabla Concerto and piano trio Love Triangle; double Merritt Award nominations; Juilliard, Mannes & Countess of Munster scholarships; the Sema Jazz Improvisation Prize; the Soroptimist International Award for Composer-Conductors; and the Sir John Manduell Prize – the RNCM’s highest student honor. His music and collaborative work embrace the great diversity of his international background and influences.

Leslie Wildman

Composer

Composer Leslie Wildman grew up outside Chicago where she studied piano with Ellen Graff Mehegan. Her first composition teacher was William O. Smith at the University of Washington. She moved to Berkeley, California and studied with Andrew Imbrie. In 1986, she received a Masters in Music in Composition from the University of California, Berkeley.

Ms. Wildman worked briefly as an orchestrator for the film composer Laurence Rosenthal. She has worked with the choreographer Henning Rübsam, and SENSEDANCE, based in New York.

She presently divides her time between New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. Major works include Overture to a Wink for large orchestra premiered in 1987 in Berkeley, California; Let Me Not Mar for soprano, oboe and piano, premiered in 1988 at the Aspen Music Festival; and Solo Flight, a theater work for soprano and electronics based on Amelia Earhart’s flight across the Atlantic, premiered in 1995 in Vienna, Austria.

Emily Cole

Violin

Emily Cole joined the Oregon Symphony in 2011. An avid chamber musician, Emily is a member of the Mousai Remix string quartet with fellow Oregon Symphony musicians Shin-Young Kwon, Jennifer Arnold, and Marilyn de Oliveira. She has also performed locally with Third Angle Ensemble, fEARnoMUSIC, 45th Parallel, and Northwest New Music. During the summer months, Emily has performed with the Oregon Bach Festival, the Seattle Opera, and the Apollo Music Festival. Emily is on the faculty at Lewis & Clark College; she also coaches chamber musicians with Portland Summer Ensembles and Seattle’s Music Northwest.

Emily earned her M.M. from the University of North Texas, where she held a teaching fellowship and studied with Emanuel Borok. She received her B.M. from the University of Texas at Austin, studying with Brian Lewis. A native of Seattle, Emily was also a longtime student of former Seattle Symphony concertmaster Ilkka Talvi.

Get the latest updates

By submitting this form, you are consenting to receive marketing emails from: Serenata of Santa Fe. You can revoke your consent to receive emails at any time by using the SafeUnsubscribe® link, found at the bottom of every email. Emails are serviced by Constant Contact