George Tsontakis

Last updated
George Tsontakis
BornOctober 24, 1951
Astoria, Queens, New York City
NationalityAmerican
OccupationComposer, conductor

George Tsontakis (born Astoria, Queens, New York City, October 24, 1951) is an American composer and conductor.

Contents

Early life and education

He was born in New York City, and is of Greek descent. Tsontakis studied composition with Hugo Weisgall and Roger Sessions at the Juilliard School from 1974 to 1978, and later with Franco Donatoni at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome.

Career

His music has been performed and broadcast by major orchestras, chamber ensembles, and festivals throughout North and South America, Europe and Japan.

Tsontakis was honored with the "Academy Award" in 1995 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was the fourth recipient of the coveted Ives Living Fellowship, in 2007. Pianist Stephen Hough's recording of Tsontakis's "Ghost Variations" on Hyperion Records was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, [1] and was the only classical recording among Time magazine's 1998 Top Ten Recordings. Tsontakis received the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin in 2002, and the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for his Violin Concerto No. 2 in 2005. [2] [3] [4] [5]

A proficient conductor of orchestral and choral music, Tsontakis has been a composer-in-residence with the Aspen Music Festival and conductor and the founding director of the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble at the Aspen Music School, where he teaches composition. He was an assistant professor at the Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music, and has served on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College. He is Distinguished Faculty, Composer-in-Residence of the Bard College Conservatory of Music in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. [6] He was a Weil fellow at Auburn University Montgomery.

Tsontakis's music has been recorded by KOCH International, New World, and Opus One, and is published by Merion Music and Poco Forte Music.[ citation needed ]

In 2008, his Violin Concerto No. 2, recorded by violinist Steven Copes and the SPCO, was nominated for a Grammy in the category of Best Classical Contemporary Composition, but lost to John Corigliano's Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan. He served as composer-in-residence with the Albany Symphony (2007–2012) as well as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (2009–10).[ citation needed ]

Related Research Articles

John Paul Corigliano Jr. is an American composer of contemporary classical music. His scores, now numbering over one hundred, have won him the Pulitzer Prize, five Grammy Awards, Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, and an Oscar.

The 8th Annual Grammy Awards were held March 15, 1966, at Chicago, Los Angeles, Nashville and New York. They recognized accomplishments of musicians for the year 1965. Roger Miller topped off the Grammys by winning 5 awards, whereas Herb Alpert and Frank Sinatra each won 4 awards.

Joan Tower is a Grammy-winning contemporary American composer, concert pianist and conductor. Lauded by The New Yorker as "one of the most successful woman composers of all time", her bold and energetic compositions have been performed in concert halls around the world. After gaining recognition for her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981), a tone poem which structurally depicts a giant tree from trunk to needles, she has gone on to compose a variety of instrumental works including Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, which is something of a response to Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, the Island Prelude, five string quartets, and an assortment of other tone poems. Tower was pianist and founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, which commissioned and premiered many of her early works, including her widely performed Petroushskates.

Aaron Jay Kernis is a Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy Award-winning American composer serving as a member of the Yale School of Music faculty. Kernis spent 15 years as the music advisor to the Minnesota Orchestra and as Director of the Minnesota Orchestra's Composers' Institute, and is currently the Workshop Director of the Nashville Symphony Composer Lab. He has received numerous awards and honors throughout his thirty-five year career. He lives in New York City with his wife, pianist Evelyne Luest, and their two children.

Tania León Cuban-American composer and conductor

Tania León is a Cuban-born American composer of both large scale and chamber works. She is also renowned as a conductor, educator, and advisor to arts organizations.

Steven Stucky American composer

Steven Edward Stucky was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer.

Quincy Porter American composer

William Quincy Porter was an American composer and teacher of classical music.

Joseph Clyde Schwantner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer, educator and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 2002. He was awarded the 1970 Charles Ives Prize.

Stephen Paul Hartke is an American composer. Hartke is best known as the composer of Meanwhile – Incidental Music to Imaginary Puppet Plays, winner of the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition in 2013.

Kevin Matthew Puts is an American composer, best known for winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for his first opera, Silent Night.

Serouj Kradjian

Serouj Kradjian is a Grammy-nominated and Juno-winning Armenian-Canadian pianist and composer.

John McLaughlin Williams is a Grammy award-winning American orchestral conductor and violinist.

José Serebrier is a Uruguayan conductor and composer. He is one of the most recorded conductors of his generation.

Ransom Wilson American flutist and conductor (born 1951)

Ransom Wilson is an American flutist, conductor, and educator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeremy Denk</span> American classical pianist

Jeremy Denk is an American classical pianist.

Kati Agócs American-Canadian composer

Kati Ilona Agócs is an American-Canadian composer and a member of the composition faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.

Malcolm Cameron Peyton is an American composer, concert director, conductor, and teacher.

The Solati Trio is a Rhode Island based classical music ensemble. The trio—Ludmilla Lifson (piano), Sophia Herman (violin), and Hrant Tatian (cello)—was formed in 1984 and has premiered many works by contemporary composers which were written for and dedicated to the ensemble.

Anthony Korf American composer, artistic director and conductor

Anthony Korf is an American composer, artistic director and conductor. While his output spans vocal and chamber music, his primary focus has been the orchestra, among which Goldkind, a work for young audiences written in collaboration with Sabina Sciubba, three symphonies, a piano concerto and a requiem, the latter commissioned and premiered by The San Francisco Symphony, figure most prominently. Other commissions include The American Composers Orchestra, The Koussevitzky Music Foundation, The Howard Hanson Fund, and The National Endowment for the Arts.

Matthew Ricketts is a Canadian composer of contemporary classical music. He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow as well as the recipient of the 2020 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2016 Jacob Druckman Prize from the Aspen Music Festival, the 2015 Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Award, a 2013 ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award, and eight prizes in the SOCAN Foundation's Awards for Young Composers. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

References

  1. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2008-12-05. Retrieved 2009-01-30.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  2. ↑ "Composer José Enrique González Medina on Writing Music Musicians Love | Table Talk". 7 March 2020.
  3. ↑ "George Tsontakis". 18 May 2006.
  4. ↑ "Yaddo Composer George Tsontakis Wins Prestigious Charles Ives Award". Archived from the original on 2007-01-11. Retrieved 2010-09-26.
  5. ↑ "Composer George Tsontakis Wins Prestigious Charles Ives Award". 12 December 2006.
  6. ↑ "George Tsontakis". www.bard.edu. Archived from the original on 2006-09-01.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.