Artists

Connecticut native Scott Perkins enjoys a multifaceted career as an international prize-winning composer, a versatile performer, an award-winning scholar, and a music professor at California State University, Sacramento. Praised by critics from publications including the Washington Post (“dramatic,” “colorful”) and the Washington Times (“perfectly orchestrated,” “haunting,” “a remarkable and welcome musical surprise”), his work has been commissioned by organizations ranging from the Washington National Opera to the American Guild of Organists and has been performed throughout North America and Europe.

Les Délices, which includes Baroque oboist Debra Nagy, Mélisande Corriveau on viola da gamba, and Eric Milnes on harpsichord, explores the dramatic potential and emotional resonance of long-forgotten music. Founded by Nagy in 2009, Les Délices has established a reputation for their unique programs that are “thematically concise, richly expressive, and featuring composers few people have heard of.” The New York Times added, “Concerts and recordings by Les Délices are journeys of discovery.”

The Phoenix Ensemble is a mixed instrument chamber music group based in New York City. It was founded in 1991 with goals to inspire a new and diverse audience for classical music through live performances, recordings, and innovative community residencies. Through supporters such as the National Endowment for the Arts, it has been in residence at a wide range of venues, including NYC’s Greenwich House, the Aaron Copland School of Music, and the 92nd Street Y. The group also encourages the creation of new works, and sheds light on important unexplored music of our time.

Mark Lieb, clarinetist, is the Founder and Artistic Director of the Phoenix Ensemble. He is a graduate of Northwestern University and The Juilliard School, where he studied clarinet performance with Robert Marcellus, former Principal clarinet with the Cleveland Orchestra, and David Shifrin, clarinet soloist and former Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He has been an active professional freelance musician since 1991, performing with many orchestras, opera companies, chamber ensembles, and new music groups in New York City.

Hayes Biggs was born in Huntsville, Alabama and raised in Helena, Arkansas. He holds the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition from Columbia University. His teachers include Don Freund, Mario Davidovsky, Jack Beeson, Fred Lerdahl and Donald Erb. Biggs has been a fellow in composition at the Composers Conference and Chamber Music Center at Wellesley, at the Tanglewood Music Center, at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. Among his honors are a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and an Aaron Copland Award, which afforded him the opportunity to live and compose at Copland House in upstate New York for several weeks. Since 1992 he has been on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music, teaching courses in the theory and composition departments.

Dana Muller and Gary Steigerwalt have performed as duo pianists for more than three decades, creating programs that encompass the historical and stylistic gamut of the piano four-hand genre. As recitalists, they have performed extensively in the United States, South America and Scotland. Festival appearances range from presenting Beethoven’s complete four-hand works at the Beethoven Festival, Oyster Bay, Long Island, to performances at Bethlehem Musikfest (Pennsylvania), Music at Penn Alps (Maryland), and Sevenars Festival and Musicorda Festival (Massachusetts).

Lewis Spratlan was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2000. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Massachusetts Artists Foundations, the NEA, the Tanglewood Festival, and the MacDowell Colony. Recent commissions include Earthrise, for the San Francisco Opera; Streaming for the Centennial Celebration of the Ravinia Festival; Wonderer for pianist Jonathan Biss; Shadow for cellist Matt Haimovitz; a concerto for a consortium of 30 saxophonists; A Summer's Day for BMOP (Boston Modern Orchestra Project), and Process/Bulge for Wet Ink. His opera Life is a Dream received its world premiere at Sante Fe Opera in July 2010. Apollo and Daphne Variations, Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra, and A Summer's Day are currently in preparation for a BMOP CD, as is his Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano for Albany Records.

Nancy Tucker is a gifted musician who “inhabits an offbeat alternative universe that inspires music to tumble into riotous abandon” says the Los Angeles Times. She approaches the guitar as if it were a miniature playground, exploring every sound from the strings to the wood to the pegs to the strap. Whether she is playing her heart-felt melodic finger-style compositions or her inventive percussion-isms, her engaging approach to acoustic guitar shines with personality. In addition, she is a lyricist, humorist and performer.

Composer and tenor saxophonist Frank Vasi graduated from the Mannes College of Music in New York City. His compositions straddle the classical and jazz worlds of music incorporating their various techniques in his pieces. A member of ASCAP, he has written compositions for saxophone quartet, choral cantatas, chamber and orchestra works and is the founder and arranger for The Thimble Islands Saxophone Quartet.

Born in Wheeling, West Virginia, John Alan Rose has been performing as pianist and composer since the age of 14. Acclaimed European pianist Andreas Haefliger once played from John’s sketchbook and was so taken with his music that he predicted his future as a composer/performer. In November of 2015, John performed his piano concerto with the Moravian Philharmonic in Olomouc, The Czech Republic, followed by a collaboration with the same orchestra and the talents of cellist JungWon Choi, violinist Simeon Simeonov, soprano Sing Rose, narrator Tyler Bunch, and conductor Miran Vaupotic on a major recording project of his four concerti (cello, piano, violin and voice) for release on the Navona Label.

Ryan Jesperson is a composer whose music is steeped in the modern practice of blurring genres and skewing expectations. Ryan holds degrees from Washington State University and The Hartt School and earned his doctorate from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he was a Chancellor’s Doctoral Fellow and recipient of the 2011 Outstanding Dissertation Award.

American art song composer Juliana Hall (b. 1958) is a prolific and highly-regarded composer of vocal music whose songs have been described as "brilliant" (Washington Post), "beguiling" (Times of London), and "the most genuinely moving music of the afternoon" (Boston Globe). Among her more than 50 song cycles and works of vocal chamber music are pieces for renowned countertenor Brian Asawa and star soprano Dawn Upshaw.

Shirley Mier is a Twin Cities-based composer, music director and music educator. She writes music of all kinds, in the theatre, educational and concert world. Orchestra works include the suite Of Lakes and Legends: Scenes from White Bear Lake (written for the Century Chamber Orchestra), and Visages, a song cycle for soprano and orchestra.

With an intense and beautiful blend of freshness and experience, the Pedroia String Quartet is bursting onto the Boston scene. To the unified and persuasive core of Peter Sulski and Rohan Gregory’s ten years of quartet playing together, add the power and fire of first violinist Jae Cosmos Lee, and the consummate beauty and flexibility of cellist Jaques Lee Wood, and you have the Pedroia Quartet.

Hailed by the Calgary Herald as having “beauty of tone and a wonderfully flexible phrasing”, Sara Hahn has been Principal Flute for the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra (CPO) since 2006. In 2005 she was Assistant Principal Flute/Piccolo with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and in 2002 she completed a three week tour of Japan and Hong Kong with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada.

Greg D'Alessio is a professor of composition at Cleveland State University, where he is also the coordinator of the electronic and computer music program. Among his honors and awards as a composer are a commission from the Koussevitsky Foundation in the Library of Congress, The Aaron Copland Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, The Cleveland Arts Prize, 2 Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Awards, the Board of Director’s Prize from the Society for electro-acoustic music (SEAMUS), The Commuinity Partnership for Arts and Culture fellowship, and the Otto Ettinger fellowship to the Tanglewood Music Festival.

Composer Kamyar Mohajer combines the influences of Eastern modality with a unique approach to harmony, counterpoint and poly-tonality. He has studied composition and orchestration with the celebrated composer and Juilliard faculty member, Behzad Ranjbaran, as well as with award-winning Stanford composer Giancarlo Aquilanti. Mohajer earned a BFA in music from York University in Toronto where he studied piano with Christina Petrowska-Quilico and Antonin Kubalek.

Dennis Kam (1942-2018), Professor Emeritus – University of Miami, was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1942. Retired from the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida since 2013, Kam was Chair of the Music Theory and Composition Department from 1976 until 2012 and also directed/conducted the Other Music Ensemble (group for the performance of new music) at the University of Miami. He was the Music/Worship Director at Granada Presbyterian Church in Coral Gables, Florida and also Composer-in- Residence/ Associate Conductor for the South Florida Youth Symphony.

Stephen Yip was born in Hong Kong and is now living in the United States. He received his doctor of musical arts (D.M.A.) at Rice University and bachelor of fine arts (B.F.A.) at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, studied with Law Wing-­fai, Clarence Mak, and Arthur Gottschalk.

Born in Aachen, Germany, Walter studied in Hamburg with Ernst-Gernot Klußmann, Wilhelm Maler, and Philipp Jarnach (Busoni’s pupil, and the teacher of Kurt Weill and Bernd Alois Zimmermann). He is prolific in all genres, from solo and chamber works to grand opera. Five of his operas were brought to stage in Germany: “Eli” inspired by Nelly Sachs and “Die Judenbuche / The Jew’s Beech” after the novella by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff were performed in Dortmund.