American Composers Orchestra (ACO) announces a new co-commission in cooperation with the record label BIS, for Symphonic B A C H Variations for Piano and Orchestra, a piano concerto by composer and conductor José Serebrier. The ACO commission is made possible by a special grant from long-time ACO board member Paul Underwood. The Swedish label BIS will undertake the recording with pianist Yevgeny Sudbin, exclusive BIS artist, with an orchestra to be announced.
BIS previously commissioned José Serebrier's Flute Concerto with Tango, which they recorded with soloist Sharon Bezaly and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. American Composers Orchestra gave the US premiere in 2012. José Serebrier has received commissions from the Harvard Musical Association, National Endowment for the Arts, the Joffrey Ballet and many others. His works have been recorded by Leopold Stokowski, Sir John Eliot Gardiner and others.
Yevgeny Sudbin has been hailed by The Telegraph as "potentially one of the greatest pianists of the 21st century." As BIS Records' only exclusive artist, all of Sudbin's recordings have met with critical acclaim and are regularly featured as CD of the Month by BBC Music Magazine or Editor's Choice by Gramophone. His Scriabin recording was awarded CD of the Year by The Telegraph and received the MIDEM Classical Award for Best Solo Instrument Recording at Cannes. It was described by Gramophone as "a disc in a million" while the International Record Review stated that his Rachmaninov recording "confirms him as one of the most important pianistic talents of our time." Sudbin was born in St. Petersburg in 1980 and began his musical studies at the Specialist Music School of the St Petersburg Conservatory with Lyubov Pevsner at the age of 5. He emigrated with his family to Germany in 1990 where he continued his studies at Hanns Eisler Musikhochschule. In 1997, Sudbin moved to London to study at the Purcell School and subsequently the Royal
Academy of Music where he completed his Bachelor and Masters degrees under Christopher Elton.
Paul Underwood, the supporter of this major new work, is a well-known figure on the new music scene. In addition to dozens of commissions and world premieres that he has underwritten, he has for many years been the lead supporter of ACO's annual Underwood New Music Readings, a program that provides career-building opportunities to emerging composers from around the country. The Readings have become a rite-of-passage for a generation of aspiring composers. The 2017 Underwood New Music Readings will be held June 21-23 in New York City. Though a performance of Serebrier's new concerto has not yet been scheduled, ACO's 2016-17 season includes the world premiere performances of two other Underwood commissions: David Hertzberg's
Symphony on March 24 at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, and Carols Simon's
Portrait of a Queen on May 23 at
Symphony Space.
José Serebrier, now a world-renowned conductor and composer, first came to prominence when he won the Uruguayan National Orchestra's annual music composition contest (SODRE) with his Legend of Faust overture, which the then 14-year-old composed in only four days. Within five years he had been honored with many of music's most sought-after awards: a Koussevitzky
Foundation Award in 1956, earned while a U.S. State
Department Fellow studying at the Curtis
Institute of Music and with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood; a BMI Young Composers Award that same year; and back to back Guggenheim Fellowships in music composition, at 19 the youngest person to have ever received a Guggenheim appointment.
During his years at the Curtis
Institute and the University of Minnesota, Serebrier continued to garner accolades and awards for his compositions, including a Pan American Union Publication Award for his Elegy for Strings, which Leopold Stokowski premiered in New York at Carnegie Hall. In 1963
Maestro Stokowski again opened the American
Symphony Orchestra's season at
Carnegie Hall with a Serebrier composition, this time Poema Elegiaco.
Leopold Stokowski and José Serebrier had first met when the conductor chose
Symphony No. 1, which Serebrier had composed at age 17 as a last-minute substitute for the world premiere of Charles Ives'
Symphony No. 4, which the
Houston Symphony had still found unplayable. Three years later, the maestro chose Serebrier as Associate Conductor of his American
Symphony Orchestra in New York. José Serebrier was the conductor at Leopold Stokowski's side at the podium for the premiere of that difficult Ives composition, a piece so complex it required several conductors. However, a few years later Serebrier alone conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra's performance of Ives'
Symphony No. 4 to rave reviews; his recording of it with that orchestra (the first time he had recorded anything) was nominated for a Grammy award, the first of 46 he has received so far in his career. He has won the Latin Grammy for "Best Classical Album of the Year" for his recording of his Carmen
Symphony after Bizet with the
Barcelona Symphony Orchestra on the BIS label.
José Serebrier has made international tours with the Russian National Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Juilliard Orchestra, National Youth Orchestra of Spain, Orchestra of the Americas, etc. and US tours with the Pittsburgh Symphony, American Composers Orchestra and others.
Born in
Uruguay of Russian and Polish parents, Serebrier has composed over 100 works and is one of the most recorded classical artists ever, as both conductor and composer with over 300 releases on Warner Classics, SONY, BIS, Naxos, Linn, Reference Recordings, and more. He has received commissions from the Harvard Musical Association, National Endowment for the Arts, the Joffrey Ballet and many more. His works have been recorded by Leopold Stokowski, Sir John Eliot Gardiner and others. Prior to his work with Leopold Stokowski, José Serebrier was Apprentice Conductor with Antal Dorati and the
Minnesota Orchestra; after his four-year tenure with Stokowski he was appointed by George Szell Composer-in-Residence of the Cleveland Orchestra under a Rockefeller
Foundation grant. They met when Szell was in the jury of the Ford
Foundation American Conductors Competition which Serebrier won together with James Levine. The French critic Michel Faure has written a new book about José Serebrier, published in France by L'Harmattan.
For more information about the upcoming 2017 programme, visit www.sco.org.uk/whats-on.
