Artists

Daniel Ott is a recipient of honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the ASCAP Foundation. He has received commissions from the National Symphony Orchestra, New York City Ballet's Choreographic Institute, the Chiara Quartet, and Bargemusic, among others. Ott’s music has been heard all over the world, most notably at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Sadler’s Wells, the Louvre, the Guggenheim, and the Foro Internacional de Música Nueva in Mexico. He holds degrees from the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School, and currently serves on the faculty of both Juilliard and Fordham University.

duo526 was founded in 2011 by violinist Kerry DuWors and pianist Futaba Niekawa at the Eastman School of Music (Rochester NY) where they worked extensively with professors Jean Barr and Charles Castleman. Invited to the Banff Centre for the Arts four times as Artists-in-Residence between 2011-2018, they worked with Henk Guittart, Roger Tapping, Lafayette String Quartet, Hardy Rittner, and Mark Steinberg. They have been featured on radio broadcasts including “Backstage Pass” WXXI (Rochester NY) and Classic 107 “Morning Light” (Winnipeg MB).

Steven Kennedy resides in New England where he freelances as a film music reviewer/commentator, bassoonist, conductor, and keyboardist. He is a member of the American Composer's Forum, the Dramatist's Guild, Leading Musicians, and BMI. He composes in a variety of genres with works for orchestra, band, chorus, and solo instruments.

Sidney Bailin started composing when he was 6. His first piece was in three-part counterpoint, a fact that he still cannot explain. Imitative counterpoint remains a defining characteristic of his music, perhaps because of his early exposure to species counterpoint, which he learned formally at the age of 10.

Composer and conductor Lee Actor (b. 1952) was one of five composers selected in November 2014 as an “Honored Artist of the American Prize”, the first time this prestigious award has been bestowed. He has won a number of awards for his compositions, most recently for Dance Rhapsody, winner of the Austin Civic Orchestra Composition Competition and second place winner of the 2011 American Prize in Orchestral Composition, Redwood Fanfare, a winner of the 2009 Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra Fanfare Competition, and Concerto for Horn and Orchestra, the First Prize Winner in the 2007 International Horn Society Composition Contest.

The music of Brooklyn-based composer Matt Frey creates intimately sentimental sonic worlds inflected with churning rhythms, minimalist-like textures, and extended moments of restless tension.

Scott Solak (b. 1961) has written works in a wide variety of genres, including solo piano, orchestral, and chamber music. The bulk of his output has been in the realm of vocal and choral music, both sacred and secular. Choral commissions include two full-length oratorios for church performance (Healing of the Blind Man and Welcome to Thy World, O King [Chevy Chase Concerts and Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church]; Velvet Shoes and This Music [Reston Chorale]; and The Day of Pentecost [private commission]. Instrumental commissions include Canzona for Oboe and Orchestra [Reston Community Orchestra]; Sonata di Gloria for two violins and piano [commissioned for the Chamasyan Sisters]; Slant of Light [Washington Saxophone Quartet]; and Sicilienne for viola and piano [private commission].

Juli Nunlist (1916 – 2006) received a B.A. in English Composition from Barnard College in 1940, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. In 1957, at the age of 40, she entered Manhattan School of Music as a composition major, and received her Bachelor’s degree in 1961 and her Master’s in 1964, studying with Vittorio Giannini, Ludmila Ulehla, and Nicholas Flagello. Her Spells is a choral setting of six poems by the English poet Kathleen Raine and was chosen for performance by the University of Kansas Concert Choir (Clayton Krehbiel conducting) at the Sixth Annual Symposium of Contemporary American Music, April 1964. In addition to Spells, her works include this string quartet, piano, choral, and chamber music, and a symphonic tone suite after Juan Ramon Jimenez’ prose poems, Platero and I.

Born in Honolulu HI, Daniel Morse was raised on every sort of music from Bob Marley to Beethoven and Paul Simon to Prokofiev. Combined with the pervasive multiculturalism of Hawaii, his background has given him a truly egalitarian outlook towards music, through which he sees that all styles and genres are somehow valid and worthwhile.

The atmospheric and evocative music of Jonathan David Little is notable for its mystical beauty, intensity, and richness of material. After initial studies at the University of Melbourne, where he won the Lady Turner Exhibition, he completed a Doctoral degree researching the development of 'exotic' orchestration in 19th and 20th-century music. Interviewed in the Sept-Oct 2012 issue of American Fanfare, Little's musical style was defined as 'ecstatic minimalism.' Italian and other European critics have preferred the more general terms 'antique futurism' or 'picturesque archaism.'

Composer Whitman Brown has received awards and commissions from organizations such as ASCAP, BMI, the Yaddo and Millay artist colonies, the Bedford Springs and Stroud Festivals, and the Warebrook Festival of Contemporary Music. Ensembles such as the Arden, Everest, and Lydian String Quartets, Kalliope Trio, Arcadian Winds, Bala Brass, and the Master Singers have performed his compositions. He is currently Head of Theory and Composition at Walnut Hill School for the Arts and has taught at Brandeis University, Boston University, Longy School of Music, and the Powers School of Music.

Matej Meštrović (b. 1969) is undoubtedly the most versatile artist on the Croatian cultural scene, and an exclusive artist of PARMA Recordings. In 2018, he premiered the Danube Rhapsody for piano and orchestra in Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, thus becoming the first Croatian composer to have his own work premiered in that prestigious hall.

Ssu-Yu Huang, a native of Taiwan, enjoys an active career in contemporary music. Her compositions – covering a wide range of music with bold and delicate genres – are performed by professional musicians and orchestras in Argentina, Canada, Chile, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United States, the United Kingdom, and Venezuela.

Shudong Braamse has appeared on stages in Canada, Italy, Austria, Estonia, Spain, Finland, Latvia, Singapore, Taiwan, and China. She has premiered a number of vocal works, including Gary Nash’s cycle Peace, Love and Prosperity premiered in Nashville in 2010, and Michael Bulychev-Okser’s Spanish art song Romance de la Luna premiered in 2014 in Tallinn, Estonia.

Composer, violinist, and poet Patricia Van Ness draws upon elements of medieval and Renaissance music to create a signature voice that has been hailed by musicians, audiences, and critics. She has been called a modern-day Hildegard von Bingen 1,2, with her ability to compose music "ecstatic and ethereal," "both ancient and new" 2,3. As in medieval aesthetics, her music and poetry explore the relationship between beauty and the Divine.

David Carpenter was born in 1972 in Poughkeepsie, NY, a city on the Hudson River just north of New York City. He began music lessons on the French horn, for which he wrote his first piece, “The Mourning Dove,” at age 10. He went on to study music at Bates College in Lewiston, ME, where he graduated summa cum laude with his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1994.

Willem Van Twillert (The Netherlands, b. 1952) studied the organ and piano at the Regional Music School in Amersfoort with Henk Seldenthuis. Starting in 1970, he studied the organ, improvisation, and composition at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam with Piet Kee and piano with Willem Brons. In 1975 he commenced a 3-year course of orchestral conducting studies with the Dutch orchestra conductor Anton Kersjes. In 1979, he obtained a diploma for Church Music and Performing Musician Cum Laude, with a teaching-endorsement for improvisation. A scholarship afforded him the opportunity to specialize in historic music between 1978 and 1981, including studies with Gustav Leonhardt (organ). In 1976, van Twillert was the first Dutch organist to reach the final of the 'Grand Prix de Chartres' in France.

Robert E. Thomas (b. 1971) is an active composer, teacher, and scholar whose music has been presented around the United States and overseas. Working in both electronic and acoustic mediums for instrumentation ranging from solo works to large orchestra, his main compositional interest is working with layered structures. His music has been performed by ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble), Composer's Chamber Ensemble, Contemporary Chamber Players, HELIX! Ensemble, Ionisation, Nodes Performing Arts, and Tony Oliver.

John Dante Prevedini (b. 1987) is a composer, educator, and public speaker hailing from Connecticut and active throughout Southern New England. Drawing upon a variety of fields of knowledge (including linguistics, the fine arts, the physical sciences, religion, and philosophy), his work aims to examine unconventional facets of everyday life through a multidisciplinary lens.

The BONIFANTES Boys Choir was founded in 1999 and in its short life has won a place among the cream of the choir ensembles in the Czech Republic. Talented boys from the ages of 4 to 20 years work in seven departments of the singing school known as “BONIFANTES School of Arts” with a capacity of 350 students. All the singers have solo voice training lessons and many of them play musical instruments. Almost 100 boys visit the concert department alone and the choir takes part in up to 100 concerts and performances each year.