TRIO CASALS

Since making a highly-acclaimed debut at the 1996 edition of the Pablo Casals Festival in Puerto Rico, Trio Casals has delighted audiences with spectacular virtuosity, engaging enthusiasm, and exquisite musical elegance.

 

Recent engagements include performances at Carnegie Hall, a week-long collaboration with the Nashville Ballet and composer Michael Kurek, appearances in the Triple Concerto by Beethoven with the Helena and Southeastern PA Symphonies, and concerts in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware.

 

Trio Casals has performed in the Rachmaninov Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, Holywell Room in Oxford, England, and at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, and has toured China and Romania.

 

Trio Casals has created original programs that juxtapose the great classical tradition of Beethoven and Brahms with new works written by American composers, such as Paul Schoenfield, Michael Kurek, George Rochberg, and Hilary Tann. Their album MOTO CONTINUO, the second in Navona Records’ MOTO series, features distinguished composers such as Brian Noyes, Osias Wilensky-Schorr, Diane Jones, and Nicholas Ascioti. Recorded for PARMA Recordings, MOTO CONTINUO was presented in concert at Carnegie Hall and other concert venues. MOTO BELLO, the third album in the series, was performed at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York in May 2018. MOTO QUARTO also culminates in a Carnegie Hall performance.

 

In addition to its performing schedule, Trio Casals is committed to music education, offering regular master classes at schools and colleges. As resident artists for Music for All Seasons, its members have played in shelters for victims of domestic abuse, nursing homes, and hospitals. All three members have distinguished careers as soloists.

 

 

David Nisbet Stewart

His music is solid in construction, imaginative in concept, and skillful in orchestration.  It appeals to audience and musicians alike.”  -Dr. David Daniels, Music Director Emeritus, Warren Symphony Orchestra

 

David Stewart was born 1941, in Miami FL, and earned a B.Mus. degree from Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, 1965, and a M.A. degree from Smith College, 1969.  His principal teachers were Bower Murphy, William Klenz, Joseph Wood, Walter Aschaffenburg, and Alvin Etler in composition; David Pizarro on organ; Arthur Dann on piano, all of blessed memory.

 

Stewart is a composer, pianist, and organist.  His career began in academia and migrated into computer technology from 1979 onward.  His style of composing also changed as he pursued a new occupation.

 

From 1969 to 1979, he taught music theory, composition, and electronic music at Eastern Michigan University and then Kent State University.  His style of composition during this period was twelve-tone and aleatoric.  Living in Ohio from 1975 to 1985, he was a member of the Cleveland Composers Guild which provided many performances of his chamber music.  In these early years he won several prizes for his chamber music.

 

A self-taught computer programmer, he began studying computer-generated sound in 1969.  He produced electronic music both by Moog synthesizer and by computer using the seminal MUSIC4 program on Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11’s.

 

From 1979 until retirement in 2013, Stewart worked as a computer systems professional. Having been a church musician most of his adult life, he is currently organist at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Ferndale MI.

 

After leaving academia, Stewart’s aesthetic changed.  He wanted to write more spontaneously the sounds from his imagination–music that was accessible to the performer and audience, while maintaining his stylistic integrity.  He became more tonal yet still used twelve-tone and aleatoric techniques when justified.

 

He is a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP); American Composers Forum; Society of Composers Inc.; Conductors Guild; and the American Guild of Organists.  He is the Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Warren Symphony Society Inc., in Warren MI. The Warren Symphony premiered three of Stewart’s works in the 2000’s.

 

Stewart believes that leaving academia for the business world was a great benefit to his art.  Music is the business of entertaining.  The composer must satisfy, even delight, the paying audience.  His compositions connect with the listener’s ear and heart.

 

The piece on this album, Three for Three, comprises three dance-like pieces for violin, cello, and piano.  It is on the fifth album produced by PARMA Recordings with Stewart’s music.  His Concerto for Piano and Orchestra and Suite for Piano-Brass Quartet are on the album CONVERGENCE, released in 2012.  Five organ pieces are on the album FOUNDATIONS released in 2014.  Fantasy for Viola Solo is on FIGMENTS released in 2016.  The previous recording in this series with Trio Casals, released in 2018, has Habanera for cello and piano.

 

www.dnsmusic.com

 

 

Emma-Ruth Richards is a composer much in demand in the UK and overseas, acclaimed for her understanding of both instrumental and vocal writing which has earned her a role as a favorite among musicians and singers.

 

2017 saw the premieres of a new commission from London Sinfonietta, a new chamber orchestra piece for Britten Sinfonia premiered at the Barbican Centre, and Two Worlds CD release of You Cannot Fold a Flood. Also in 2017 was a showcase of her new opera Traffick, written with librettist Nic Chalmers. Traffick is commissioned and developed with the Nordland Teater of Norway, the Royal Opera House in London, and Mahogany Opera. The 2018/9 season has seen American premieres with Camerata Pacifica (Nicholas Daniel, oboe) touring California, and two portrait concerts in Manchester’s Stoller Hall including a world premiere with the Zelkova Quartet. Until a Reservoir No Longer Remains, a new cello duet for Classical Brit Award winner Guy Johnston and the 2016 BBC Young Musician of the Year Sheku Kanneh-Mason, premieres in London in June 2019. Richards is currently working on a new piano trio for the Albany Trio, commissioned by Stoller Hall for International Women’s Day 2019, and a string quartet commissioned for the Carducci Quartet for Presteigne Festival 2020.

 

Previously, Richards has been commissioned by London Sinfonietta, Opera North Orchestra, London Philharmonia, Håkan Hardenberger, Colin Currie, Nicholas Daniel, Mark Van de Wiel, Paul Silverthorne, Dudok Kwartet, BBC NOW Chamber Players, and The Absolution Saxophone Quartet amongst others. She is a Royal Northern Gold Medal composer and has featured in festivals including Presteigne (2018), Mahogany Opera's Various Stages Festival (2017), York Spring Festival (2017), Mons Capital of Culture (2015), Southbank’s Changing Britain Festival (2015), Aldeburgh (2014), Sound Scotland (2013), Internationaal Kamermuziekfestival Den Haag (2012), St. Magnus Festival (2012), Sounds New Canterbury (2010), and Music of Today Southbank (2009).

 

Richards read music at Cardiff University and then completed her PhD at the Royal Northern College of Music. She has since worked with composers such as Alexander Goehr, Oliver Knussen, Judith Weir, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, and Colin Matthews. photo: Keith Malone Photography

 

"Accomplished" - Sunday Times

 

" a composer of exceptional refinement and subtlety ... [with] a gift for writing idiomatic, deeply expressive pieces...lucid, impassioned and compelling" – Musical Opinion, Paul Conway

 

"Highly charged and simply beautiful" - OperaNorth, Bachtrack

 

www.emmaruthrichards.com

 

Joanne D. Carey studied composition with Lou Harrison, Tikey Zes, and Alan Strange at San Jose State University where she earned B.A. and M.A. degrees (1979, 1986). She spent a decade (1983-1993) as a visiting composer at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) during which she composed three computer-generated pieces. These include gamelan R-gong gong (1984), a piece based on gamelan structures and two pieces using John Chowning's voice-instrument program, Clouds' Lament (1988), and Intonations of the Wind (1990). The latter two developed detailed control of synthesized voices to produce unusual choral effects. Clouds' Lament was described as "essentially an atonal fantasia . . . with ethereal, gliding voices . . . evocative and poetic piece" (Palo Alto Daily News) and Intonations of the Wind as “a rich polyphony . . . well balanced, beautifully processed and crafted into orchestral textures" (Computer Music Journal). Her involvement with CCRMA continued to have a major influence on the direction of her musical energies. The following decade, she took up the radio-baton, a unique controller invented at CCRMA by professor Max Matthews, (Max Mathews Radio Baton Demonstration - YouTube). Intrigued by this accompanying instrument, she composed and transcribed seven pieces for it that were performed with various instrumental and vocal soloists. Among these are Three Spanish Songs for soprano and radio baton inspired by poetry of Pablo Neruda. They have been performed at concerts around the United States as well as in Poland, Mexico, and Hong Kong. A recording featuring soprano Maureen Chowning is available from the composer. Other major pieces in this oeuvre include Adventures on a Theme (1997) for flute and radio baton that features a radio-baton improvisation movement based on programs in C++ created by the composer, and Sinfonia Concertante (2008) for French horn and radio-baton. An instrumental version of Sinfonia Concertante was released in 2014 on the Navona Records album FOUNDATIONS.

 

In 2018, her Piano Trio No.1: Solo la Sombra was recorded by Trio Casals and performed in the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in May. This piano trio was a transposition of a previous vocal setting of Neruda’s poetry for soprano, piano, and cello. The composer feels extremely fortunate to be able to collaborate with Trio Casals a second time and enjoy their virtuosic playing and expressive grasp of the nuances of her latest Piano Trio No. 2.

Allyson B. Wells began composing and arranging as a teenager, when her name was Allyson Brown, and was 18 when her first arrangement, for choir, was commercially published. Two years later, one of her compositions was commercially published. She has earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees and Ph.D., all in music composition, and has taught music theory and composition at the university level since the 1980’s.

 

Her compositions have been performed and broadcast on three continents, and her music has been cited in Avant-Garde Choral Music and Guide to the Tuba Repertoire: The New Tuba Sourcebook, among other resources. Over the years, beginning in the 1970’s, her music has been performed and published under several versions of her name: Allyson Brown, Allyson Brown Applebaum, and Allyson B. Wells.

 

 

L peter Deutsch is a native of Massachusetts, now living in Sonoma County CA. His early music education included performance and composition for voice, piano, and recorder. After a long detour through a distinguished career in Computer Science, he returned to composition part-time in 1986 and full-time in 2003, including a M.A. degree under Frank La Rocca at CSU Hayward.

 

Deutsch's strengths as a composer include sparkling counterpoint and polyphony, lyrical melodies, fluent text setting, and the use of a large harmonic palette centered around modal scales. He writes primarily for small instrumental or a cappella vocal ensembles, spanning styles from devotional to romantic to jazzy, and from Renaissance to early 20th Century. Scores of his music are distributed commercially through J.W. Pepper and Sheet Music Plus. His work to date includes three choral commissions in 2008-2010, and several recording releases through PARMA Recordings from 2016 onward, including music for chorus, string quartet, and piano trio.

 

www.lpd.org

 

Christopher Brakel (b. 1977) is a composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music, an educator/arts advocate, a music copyist/engraver, and a technology consultant.

 

To date, his concert works have been commissioned and performed across the United States and in Canada, Colombia, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, and Italy. These performances have included prominent regional, national, and international festivals, conferences, and concerts, including the L.A. Composers Project, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, SEAMUS and SCI National Conferences, FSU Festival of New Music, June in Buffalo, Midwest Composers Symposium, and the Czech-American Summer Music Institute.

 

Recordings and publications of his works can be found on Centaur Records, PARMA Recordings, Firnspiegel Music (ASCAP), and qPress.

 

His collaborative multimedia works have been featured and awarded at festivals such as the Toronto Online Film Festival, Downstream International Film Festival, Not Still Art Festival, Boston CyberArts Festival, and ImageMovementSound.

 

Brakel has received recognition for his work through awards such as the Howard Hanson Large Ensemble Prize, the Henry and Parker Pelzer Prize in Composition, and annual ASCAP awards.

 

He holds advanced degrees in composition from the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester (Ph.D.) and the University of Iowa (M.A.), and a B.A. in Music from the  University of Minnesota, where he studied percussion and composition. Additionally, he is a member of the Pi Kappa Lambda National Music Honor Society. Brakel has held teaching positions at Chapman University, the Eastman School of Music, and the University of Iowa.

 

As a speaker, he has given lectures on Carlo Gesualdo and Georg Friedrich Haas (Monday Evening Concerts) and on Paul Celan and Contemporary Music (University of Colorado, Boulder and RochesterInk Poetry Festival). His research focuses on musical semiotics and the relationship(s) between music and poetry, with special emphasis on the poet Paul Celan, as well as the music of the Swedish composer Allan Pettersson.

 photo: Christopher Brakel | Montreux, Switzerland

 

christopherbrakel.com

Clare Shore the second woman to earn the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Composition from The Juilliard School, has received critical acclaim for her works, with reviewers from The New York Times, New York Post, Boston Globe, Washington Post, and others hailing her works as "provocative," "immensely dramatic," "unpretentious," "ingenious and evocative," "intriguing," and "romantic to the core." While at Juilliard, she studied with David Diamond, Vincent Persichetti, Roger Sessions, and subsequently with Gunther Schuller. Shore was granted the prestigious Irving Berlin Fellowship in Memory of Jerome Kern, was awarded two teaching fellowships, and received the Alexandre Gretchaninov Memorial Award upon graduation.

 

Shore has received numerous commissions, awards, and grants, among them the ASCAP’s Grant to Young Composers and Standard Awards, Composers Assistance Grants from the AMC, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a fellowship to the Atlantic Center for the Arts, an Artist-in-Education Grant from the VA Commission for the Arts, a grant from the CO Commission for the Arts, another from the Contemporary Record Society, numerous Meet-the-Composer Grants, a Composer Fellowship from the NEA, and others. Shore's works have been performed in Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, Merkin Concert Hall, the National Gallery of Art, the Barns of WolfTrap, Charleston's Spoleto Festival, as well as throughout the United States, the British Isles, Europe, and Australia. She has served as Composer-in-Residence at Palm Beach Atlantic University, with the Colorado Recorder Festival, Hanover County School System, Dakota Wind Quintet, Charles Ives Center for American Music, was a Composing Fellow with Pierre Boulez at Carnegie Hall, and was chosen as an alternate in the Luce Scholars Program for Asian Internships.

Shore received a B.A. degree, cum laude, with Honors in Music, from Wake Forest University, earning a K-12 Teaching Certificate as well; she studied composition with Annette LeSiege, voice with Donald Hoirup, oboe and saxophone with Davidson Burgess, and conducting with Charles Smith. Shore earned a M.Mus degree in Composition from the University of Colorado at Boulder, studying composition with Charles Eakin and Cecil Effinger, and voice with Louis Cunningham.

In addition to her work as a composer, Shore has led an active career as mezzo-soprano and conductor. She performed with the Robert Shaw Chorale in Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall and at Princeton University; has been employed as a staff singer with the Delray Beach Chorale, Miami's Bal Harbour Church-by-the-Sea, Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Palm Beach FL, among others, and has served as Director of Music at Calvary UMC in Lake Worth FL. She holds memberships with ASCAP, New Music USA, NACUSA, SCI, IAWM and its predecessor, AWC (serving on the Boards of both).

Shore holds an exclusive publishing contract with E.C. Schirmer Publishing. Her works are recorded on CRS, Owl Recordings, Opus One, and PARMA’s Navona label, many of them produced by Grammy Award-winning Elite Recordings. She has taught at Fordham University, Manhattan School of Music, the University of Virginia, George Mason University, and Palm Beach Atlantic University.

 

clareshore.com

Keith Allan Kramer’s compositions has been performed and recorded by the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra, the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra, David Taylor, Leonard Garrison, and many others. Recent performances of his work include two all-Kramer programs at New York’s Merkin Hall, which were documented on the DVD Beyond Sonic Boundaries Live!. Additional releases include the critically acclaimed albums CASUAL DUALISM and EMERGE. L’etere del Tempo for oboe and piano was recently released on the 32nd volume of the Society Of Composers, Inc. CD series and was performed at the Back Cove Contemporary Music Festival in 2018. Kramer’s work Sogni was recently premièred, recorded, and performed on tour by acclaimed British pianist Martin Jones, and released on the third volume of the PnOVA American Piano Music Series. A recent European première of his work Rinnovo, for piano and percussion, featured internationally renowned pianist Anna D'Errico.

 

photo: Jonathan Tadiello of The Image Standard

 

keithkramer.org

Mathew Fuerst

“Mathew Fuerst so vigorously controls his material that it never verges on the sentimental”-Alex Ross, The New Yorker

 

A recipient of two consecutive Palmer-Dixon Prizes for best composition presented by The Juilliard School, composer Mathew Fuerst (b. 1977) has also received third prize in the 2nd Annual Antonín Dvořák Composition Competition held in Prague CZ. Other prizes include numerous ASCAP awards and being selected as a finalist in the Whitaker Competition, presented by the American Composers Orchestra. Fuerst's works have been performed in Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, New York State Theatre, Merkin Hall, Miller Theatre at Columbia University, and Bargemusic in Brooklyn NY as well as in Boston, Dallas, Houston, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Montreal, Paris, Budapest, Scotland, and Hong Kong. At the Harare International Festival of the Arts, Fuerst’s works were performed by world-renowned musicians such as cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, pianist Vicky Chow, Deutsche Grammophon recording artist Ilya Gringolts, Canadian violin virtuoso Jasper Wood, and multiple members of the Chiara Quartet. Upcoming performances include Totentanz for piano trio in Carnegie Hall, a tour around the United States and Canada of the third violin sonata, and a concert devoted to his music at National Sawdust in Brooklyn NY.

 

Recent commissions include a sonata for solo viola written for Nadia Sirota, a work for singing violin commissioned by Rebecca Fischer (Chiara Quartet), a string quartet for the New York City Ballet Choreographic Institute's 10th Anniversary Celebration in collaboration with renowned German choreographer Marco Goecke, Calendar Variations commissioned by Jeffrey Zeigler (Kronos Quartet), and a second string quartet for the Amernet Quartet. Fuerst's previous commission from the New York City Ballet's Choreographic Institute, Clarinet Quartet, was written in collaboration with New York City Ballet Principal Dancer Albert Evans. The ballet sparked the interest of the Washington Ballet, which performed it during their Love: 7x7 series. It was so successful that it was immediately presented by the New York City Ballet as part of the opening gala performance the following season. Upcoming commissions include a multimedia triple brass quintet in collaboration with astrophysicists from Northwestern University for Axiom Brass, a work for flute and violin for Molly Barth (eighth blackbird), a sonata for violin and piano for Hyeyung Yoon (Chiara Quartet), and a trio for violin, cello, and piano, among others.

 

Equally at home as a pianist, Fuerst has appeared as soloist performing his own work with the Eastman Philharmonic under the direction of Alan Pierson. While a student at the summer festival at the prestigious La Schola Cantorum in Paris, where he studied with Samuel Adler, he performed his Three Etudes for piano. Fuerst has also commercially recorded his solo piano work, The Drift of Things.

 

He holds a bachelor's degree in composition from the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with David Liptak, Christopher Rouse, Joseph Schwantner, Sydney Hodkinson, and Augusta Read Thomas, and piano with Alan Feinberg. He holds master's and doctorate degrees in composition from The Juilliard School, where he worked with Robert Beaser and John Corigliano.

 

Fuerst is currently an Associate Professor of Music at Doane University. His music has been recorded and released by PARMA Recordings and Albany Records.

 

photo: Wade Carignan

 

mathewfuerst.com