Kenneth Fuchs: Falling Man; Movie House; Songs of Innocence & of Experience / Roderick Williams, baritone

Kenneth Fuchs, composer

Kenneth Fuchs (b. 1956) is an American composer, conductor, and educator. He is Professor of Music Composition at the University of Connecticut (Storrs).

Fuchs has composed music for orchestra, band, chorus, and various chamber ensembles. With Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson, he created three chamber musicals, The Great Nebula in Orion, A Betrothal,and Brontosaurus, which were originally presented by Circle Repertory Company in New York City. His music is regularly performed in the United States, Europe, China, and Japan.

The London Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of JoAnn Falletta, has recorded four discs of Fuchs’s music for Naxos American Classics. The first, released in August 2005, was nominated for two Grammy Awards. The second disc, which features music for horn, was released in January 2008. Following the release of this disc, MusicWeb-International stated, “Fuchs’s distinctive voice is evident from the outset, and his flair for orchestral colours and sheer lyricism shine through.” The third disc, recorded in August 2011 at London’s historic Abbey Road Studios, was released in August 2012. Following the release of this disc, BBC Music Magazine stated, “Kenneth Fuchs writes tonal orchestral music of great imagination. He’s a master of orchestral writing. On Naxos’s third Fuchs recording, everything gets five-star treatment. The LSO under JoAnn Falletta sounds brilliant in a spacious Abbey Road recording.” The fourth disc, recorded at Abbey Road Studios in August 2013, featuring a program of vocal music based on texts by Don DeLillo, John Updike, and William Blake, was released in August 2014. Gramophone Magazinefeatured the disc in its Awards Issue (October 2014), stating, “Fuchs claims his own expressive warmth and colour…. The performances are exemplary, from baritone Roderick Williams’s commanding artistry to the bold, fresh playing of the London Symphony Orchestra under JoAnn Falletta’s sensitive direction.”

Fuchs’s latest disc of chamber music was released by Naxos in April 2013 and includes Falling Canons (Christopher O’Riley, piano), Falling Trio (Trio21), and String Quartet No. 5 “American” (Delray String Quartet). The disc received outstanding reviews in print and at on-line sources, including Fanfare Magazine, Gramophone Magazine, and MusicWeb-International.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Fuchs

Roderick Williams, bass-baritone

Roderick Williams (b. 1965) is an English operatic baritone.

Williams was born in North London; his father was English and his mother Jamaican. He studied on the Opera Course at the Guildhall School of Music in London. During his time there he made his operatic debut as Tarquinius in Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia.

He has appeared as a soloist with English National Opera, Opera North, Scottish Opera, New Israeli Opera, BBC Proms and at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. He has also worked with orchestras throughout Europe, including all the BBC orchestras in the UK, and has given recitals at venues such as the Wigmore Hall.

On 13 September 2014 Williams was soloist at the Last Night of the Proms for the first time. In the course of the evening, he performed in the Richard Strauss cantata, Taillefer, sang his own arrangements of two songs, and was the soloist in “Rule Britannia”.

He is married with a son and two daughters.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roderick_Williams

JoAnn Falletta, conductor

JoAnn Falletta (b. 1954) is an American classical musician and orchestral conductor.

Born in New York City on February 27, 1954, she was raised in the borough of Queens in an Italian-American household. Falletta was educated at the Mannes College of Music and The Juilliard School in New York City. She began her musical career as a virtuoso guitar and mandolin player, and in her twenties was often called to perform with the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic when a work called for a mandolin or guitar obbligato. She entered Mannes in 1972 as a guitar student, but began conducting the student orchestra in her freshman year, immediately precipitating her desire for a career as a conductor. While the Mannes administration at that time expressed doubts about the ability of any woman to gain a music directorship, it consented to an official transfer of emphasis for Falletta. After graduation, she pursued further study at Queens College (M.A. in orchestral conducting) and the Juilliard School of Music (M.M., D.M.A. in orchestral conducting). Falletta studied conducting with Jorge Mester, Semyon Bychkov, and others, including master classes under Leonard Bernstein.

In 1991, Falletta was appointed the eleventh music director of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra. In May 2011, she signed the most recent extension of her Virginia contract through the 2015–2016 season.^[1] She has also served as music director of the Long Beach Symphony and of The Women’s Philharmonic Orchestra (San Francisco).^[2] In May 1998, Falletta was named music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, and she formally took up the post with the 1999–2000 season. During her tenure in Buffalo, the orchestra has made recordings for Naxos and returned to Carnegie Hall after a 20-year absence. In 2004, the orchestra and television station WNED established the JoAnn Falletta International Guitar Concerto Competition. Her present contract with the organization runs through the 2015–2016 season.^[3] In 2011 she was appointed artistic director of the Hawai’i Symphony Orchestra. In 2011 she was appointed the Principal Guest Conductor of the Brevard Music Institute, serving through the 2013 season.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JoAnn_Falletta

London Symphony Orchestra

The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), founded in 1904, is the oldest of London’s symphony orchestras. It was set up by a group of players who left Henry Wood’s Queen’s Hall Orchestra because of a new rule requiring players to give the orchestra their exclusive services. The LSO itself later introduced a similar rule for its members. From the outset the LSO was organised on co-operative lines, with all players sharing the profits at the end of each season. This practice continued for the orchestra’s first four decades.

The LSO underwent periods of eclipse in the 1930s and 1950s when it was regarded as inferior in quality to new London orchestras, to which it lost players and bookings: the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic in the 1930s and the Philharmonia and Royal Philharmonic after the Second World War. The profit-sharing principle was abandoned in the post-war era as a condition of receiving public subsidy for the first time. In the 1950s the orchestra debated whether to concentrate on film work at the expense of symphony concerts; many senior players left when the majority of players rejected the idea. By the 1960s the LSO had recovered its leading position, which it has retained subsequently. In 1966, to perform alongside it in choral works, the orchestra established the LSO Chorus, originally a mix of professional and amateur singers, later a wholly amateur ensemble.

As a self-governing body, the orchestra selects the conductors with whom it works. At some stages in its history it has dispensed with a principal conductor and worked only with guests. Among conductors with whom it is most associated are, in its early days, Hans Richter, Sir Edward Elgar, and Sir Thomas Beecham, and in more recent decades Pierre Monteux, André Previn, Claudio Abbado, Sir Colin Davis and Valery Gergiev.

Since 1982, the LSO has been based in the Barbican Centre in the City of London. Among its programmes there have been large-scale festivals celebrating composers as diverse as Berlioz, Mahler and Bernstein. The LSO claims to be the world’s most recorded orchestra; it has made gramophone recordings since 1912 and has played on more than 200 soundtrack recordings for the cinema, of which the best known include the Star Wars series.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Symphony_Orchestra