Artists

Hailed by Gramophone for her “characterful sparkle,” Jasmin Arakawa has performed widely in North America, Central and South America, Europe, China, and Japan. A prizewinner of the Jean Françaix International Music Competition, she has been heard at Carnegie Hall, Salle Gaveau in Paris, and Victoria Hall in Geneva, as well as in broadcasts of the BBC and Radio France. Arakawa is Assistant Professor of Piano at the University of Florida. She is a graduate of Indiana University (D.M., M.M.) and Tokyo University of the Arts (B.M.).

Aaron Haas and Anastasia Malliaras of Duo Apollon perform art song repertoire for voice and classical guitar. With grace, poise, and fearless expressivity, they bring new life to repertoire originally written for voice and piano, and showcase song cycles rarely heard written specifically for the voice and guitar ensemble. The pair met while studying music at the University of Southern California and began by performing The Divan of Moses ibn Ezra by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. After playing a number of recitals at the University, they began to branch out and play at various venues throughout Los Angeles.

Fabio Aantonelli was born in Rome in 1966 and studied musicology and composition with great Italian composers like Ivan Fedele, Mario Garuti, and Gabriele Manca. He graduated in Musicology at the University of Pavia (Italy) and in Composition from The Como Conservatory of Music (Italy), then he graduated with a Master’s in Composition from The Milan Conservatory (Italy). He’s achieved advanced degrees in Astrophysics and Cosmology from the University of Bologna (Italy). With his work, Antonelli tries to represent the silence of the universe. His music consists of fragments that are isolated and suspended in the Void.

Simon Andrews is an English composer who is earning a reputation as a creator of eloquent concert music that blends harmonic complexity and lyricism, introversion and broad gestures, delicate timbres and bold statements. His output ranges from large-scale orchestral works and opera to intimate chamber music, with a special delight in chamber music with solo voices. He studied at Oxford University, and the Royal Academy of Music, and gained a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Winner of the 1985 Benjamin Britten Prize, his music has been commissioned and performed to critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.

Deborah J. Anderson grew up in Tacoma WA and began composing at age 6. As a teenager she studied piano and voice. In college she majored in languages and she later served in the Peace Corps in Tunisia, where she taught English, studied Arabic music, and learned to play the ‘oud and sing in Arabic. After earning a master's degree in French (University of Washington, Seattle), she taught at the college level for a number of years. From 2000 to 2011 she sang in the Pacific Lutheran University Choral Union. She enjoys her four adult children, the arts, travel, and gourmet cooking.

Andrew Anderson (b. 1971) is based in Melbourne, Australia, where he studied composition with Rodney Ford, violin with Barbara O’Reilly, and piano with Arvon McFadden. His choral works are informed by engagements with parish choirs in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as private tuition in singing with Nigel Wickens (Cambridge UK). From 2021 through 2022, he was the inaugural composer in residence at St James' Old Cathedral.

Douglas Anderson is a composer, conductor, educator, and producer who has been active in the New York area for 45 years.  He studied music and psychology at Columbia University, where his three degrees culminated in a doctorate in music composition in 1980. His professional career began as a jazz musician at the age of 12, and he performed widely in the Eastern United States before moving to New York to attend college. His work as a conductor has been his performance focus for the last several decades.

Musician and composer Kjell Magne Andersen, was born in 1954. At the age of ten he began to play guitar and later he was presented with the clarinet. He received his musical education from Barratt Due's Music Institute in Oslo, with clarinet as his primary instrument.

Laurie Altman was born in 1944 and raised in New York City. He attended the Mannes College of Music in New York where he majored in composition and studied most notably with William Sydeman and Lester Trimble. Altman has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the Mason Gross Fellowship, a Lincoln Center Composers Forum Award, a Woodrow Wilson Composers residency Fellowship, and a University Professors Citation of Excellence from Tufts University in Boston. A Resident Composer at Westminster Choir College/Rider University in Princeton NJ for many years, Altman in addition pursued an extensive career as a performing jazz pianist with his quintet in New York City, and other venues including clubs and festivals in Russia, Helsinki, and Germany. Since moving to Switzerland in 2010, he has had two European premieres at the Musikverein in Vienna, as well as performances in Zurich.

Alexis Alrich started piano lessons at age eight with a rare teacher who encouraged her to start music composition at the same time. Her studies continued at the New England Conservatory of Music, California Institute of the Arts, and with Lou Harrison at Mills College in California. Harrison was a key mentor, and Alrich’s music is also influenced by West Coast Minimalism, French Impressionism, Asian music, and American roots music. Her compositional style is tonal and melodic, using lively rhythms and colorful timbres to weave a musical narrative.

A versatile conductor, Eric Allen is sought as a conductor of all types of ensembles. At Texas Tech University, Allen serves as director of the Contemporary Music Ensemble. Under his direction, the CME has performed exciting and innovative programs in a variety of venues, providing opportunities for musicians to experience exploratory repertoire in a nurturing and collaborative environment.

Coro Allegro, Boston's acclaimed chorus for members and friends of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, seek to affirm, strengthen, and enrich the lives of its members and the broader community through the presentation of outstanding performances of choral music. Coro Allegro performances have been broadcast on WGBH's "Classical Performances" and brought to national and international audiences through performances at four GALA Choruses Festivals and the Eastern Division Convention of the American Choral Directors Association.

Award-winning composer Adrienne Albert (ASCAP) has had her chamber, choral, vocal, orchestral, and wind band works performed throughout the United States and around the world. Having previously worked as a singer with composers Igor Stravinsky, Leonard Bernstein, Philip Glass, and Gunther Schuller among many others, Albert began composing her own music in the 1990s.

Born 1949 in Kingston, Jamaica, Alberga decided at the age of five to be a concert pianist. Five years later she was composing works for the piano. In 1968 she won the biennial Royal Schools of Music Scholarship for the West Indies, which she took up in 1970 at the Royal Academy of Music in London, studying piano and singing. But a budding career as a solo pianist — she was one of three finalists in the International Piano Concerto Competition in Dudley, UK in 1974 — was further augmented by composition with her arrival at The London Contemporary Dance Theatre in 1978. Under the inspirational leadership of its Artistic Director, Robert Cohan, she became one of the very few pianists with the deepest understanding of modern dance and her company class improvisations became the stuff of legend.

Ahmed Alabaca is an African American composer, conductor, songwriter, pianist, and community facilitator creating power and possibility, through music, for himself and the diverse communities he is a part of. Raised in San Bernardino CA, in a low-income community, Alabaca knows the value of hard work and perseverance in the face of systemic and interpersonal challenges. Alabaca’s vision is “a new renaissance” for underrepresented composers, which centers on the works of people of color and creates opportunities for them to perform, record, and archive their work.

The music of Canadian-American composer Karim Al-Zand (b.1970) has been called “strong and startlingly lovely” (Boston Globe). His compositions are wide-ranging in influence and inspiration, encompassing solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works. From scores for dance, to compositions for young people, to multidisciplinary and collaborative works, Al-Zand’s music is diverse in both its subject matter and its audience. It explores connections between music and other arts, and draws inspiration from varied sources such as graphic art, myths and fables, folk music of the world, film, spoken word, jazz, and his own Middle Eastern heritage.

Samuel Adler was born March 4, 1928 in Mannheim, Germany and came to the United States in 1939. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 2001, and then inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in October 2008. In 2018 he was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz (first class), the highest civilian award given by the German government. He is the composer of over 400 published works, including five operas, six symphonies, 17 concerti, eight string quartets, five oratorios, and many other orchestral, band, chamber and choral works, and songs, which have been performed all over the world.

A pianist who "can create whatever type of music he wants at the keyboard" (Chicago Sun-Times) and a composer who writes "with uncommon imagination" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution), James Adler's extensive list of compositions is headed by Memento mori: An AIDS Requiem.

DANIEL ADAMS (b. 1956, Miami FL) is a Professor of Music at Texas Southern University in Houston. Adams holds a Doctor of Musical Arts (1985) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a Master of Music from the University of Miami (1981) and a Bachelor of Music from Louisiana State University (1978). He served as the College Music Society Board Member for Composition from 2015 through 2017.

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.