Bios

Nathaniel Stookey | Amherst Ballet Company | Lewis Spratlan | Erin Keefe | Andrey Tchekmazov

NICHOLAS KITCHEN

Nicholas Kitchen, whose musicianship has been hailed by the New York Times as "thrilling, vibrant and captivating," is one of the most active and innovative performers today.

Born in Durham, North Carolina, Kitchen grew up in a family of musicians. At 16, he began studying at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where he spent five years working intensively with the great violinist and conductor Szymon Goldberg. Mr. Kitchen today teaches his students in the tradition of Mr. Goldberg and was entrusted with the master’s legendary Guarneri del Gesù violin – the Goldberg Baron Vita – by his wife, Miyoko Yamane Goldberg. Though the Baron Vita, and its twin, the "Kreisler" Guarneri, is part of the collection of the Library of Congress, the instrument has been given to Kitchen for duration of his performing career.

At the end of his studies at Curtis in 1989, Nicholas joined three of his schoolmates in founding the Borromeo String Quartet, now one of the most sought after and critically acclaimed ensembles in the world, and the official quartet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Kitchen has performed a wide range of repertoire, including all of Bach’s works for unaccompanied violin, all the Beethoven violin sonatas, and the complete Beethoven, Bartok, Schoenberg, Schuller, and Shostakovitch string quartets. He has been involved in the creation of many new works, including a premiere of the violin concerto by Stephen Jaffe, which was written for him.

Kitchen has worked closely with WGBH in Boston and National Public Radio in Washington and has recorded for numerous record companies. In addition to these more traditional activities, he founded a new type of recording company, Living Archive, devoted to communicating the essence of live music. Working with leading engineers, he developed a procedure for capturing the sound of live concerts in high fidelity and video in high definition. Embracing technology he often employs video projections and his own computer animation during performances, and is currently working on the multi-media staging of a new opera by Mohammed Fairouz. With the Borromeo, he has also pioneered the on-stage use of laptop computers from which the musicians read from full four-part scores, and often from the composer’s manuscript, rather than individual parts, a technique that has transformed their rehearsals and performances, as detailed in the New York Times feature article “Bytes and Beethoven” (January 16, 2011).

Mr. Kitchen, a recipient of both the Albert Schweitzer Medallion for Artistry and the Presidential Scholar in the Arts awards, also performs as a member of the acclaimed ensemble Music From Copland House, and was Artistic Director of the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival for six years, until 2006.

Kitchen has played for many years on a Stradivarius violin purchased for long-term loan to him by the A.J. Fletcher Foundation in Raleigh, NC. Where he is able to play the Goldberg Guarnieri del Gesù, the Foundation has graciously allowed the “Red Cross Knight” to be used by the second violinist of the Borromeo Quartet.

Nicholas Kitchen has appeared twice before with the PVS, performing Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major in 1994, and Dvorak's Violin Concerto in 1996.

YEESUN KIM

Hailed by the New York Times for her "focused intensity" and "remarkable" performances, cellist Yeesun Kim enjoys worldwide acclaim as a soloist, chamber musician and teacher. A founding member of the Borromeo String Quartet, Ms. Kim has performed in over 20 countries, in many of the world's most illustrious concert halls and festivals.

Since making her orchestral debut at the age of 13 with the Korean Broadcasting Service Symphony, Ms. Kim has appeared at such premier venues as Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Jordan Hall in Boston, the Library of Congress and Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Her international appearances have included performances throughout Europe and Asia, including the Philharmonie in Berlin, the Tonhalle in Zurich, the Opera Bastille in Paris, Wigmore Hall in London, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Suntory Hall and Casals Hall in Tokyo, and the Saejong Cultural Center in Seoul. Currently living in Boston, Ms. Kim enjoys returning to her native Korea, where she is frequently invited to perform as soloist with the Korean Symphony, give recitals and teach.

A much sought after chamber musician, Ms. Kim has performed at such festivals as Spoleto in the United States and Italy, Ravinia, Marlboro, Santa Fe, La Jolla, the Prague Spring Festival, the Vancouver Chamber Music, the Stavanger Festival in Scandinavia and the Evian and Divonne Festival in France. Her frequent collaborations with other artists have included appearances with Joshua Bell, Christoph Eschenbach, Leon Fleisher, Gary Graffman, Menahem Pressler, Rudolph Serkin, Russell Sherman, and Richard Stoltzman, In addition to her extensive concert schedule with the Borromeo Quartet, she has concertized with members of the Guarneri and Juilliard String Quartets, and appears frequently as a member of the Pamela Frank-Yeesun Kim-Wu Han piano trio.

As a member of the Borromeo Quartet, Ms. Kim has been part of the Ensemble in Residence for NPR's Performance Today and has had extensive involvement with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's Chamber Music Two Program. In this capacity, Ms. Kim has performed on all the series of the Chamber Music Society, including being featured on a "Live from Lincoln Center" broadcast. Her radio and television credits also include numerous appearances on WGBH in Boston, Radio France, and NHK Radio and Television in Japan.

A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, with advanced degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music, Ms. Kim currently serves on the faculty of the New England Conservatory in the cello and chamber music departments. Her teachers have included Minja Hyun, Hyungwon Chang, David Soyer and Lawrence Lesser.

Recipient of the Chamber Music America's Cleveland Quartet Award and Lincoln Center's Martin Segal Award as a member of the Borromeo Quartet, Ms. Kim has garnered numerous awards individually as well, including winner of the Ewha and Jungagng National Competitions in Korea, and the Seoul Young Artists Award for achievement in music and academics.

Ms. Kim plays a Peregrino Zanetto cello, circa 1576

LEWIS SPRATLAN

Lewis Spratlan, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in music for his opera LIFE IS A DREAM (Act II, concert version), is a widely performed and much honored composer. Often praised for his music’s high dramatic impact and brilliant scoring, Spratlan is the recipient of grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among many. A native of Miami, he studied with Mel Powell and Gunther Schuller at Yale, and has taught and conducted at Tanglewood, The Yale Summer School of Music and Art, and Amherst College, where he was on the faculty from 1970 until his retirement in 2006.

His music has been performed in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh, Miami, London, Brussels, Milan, Moscow, Montreal, Toronto, and, perhaps most frequently, Boston, where he has received commissions and premieres from the Boston Musica Viva, Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, soprano Karol Bennett, and pianist John McDonald. Other New England-based ensembles, including the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, the Lydian String Quartet, the Windsor Quartet, and Ancora have performed his works as well.

Spratlan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera LIFE IS A DREAM (Act II, concert version) was premiered on January 28 and 30, 2000, in Amherst and Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble under the baton of J. David Jackson. Leading the cast were Metropolitan Opera artists John Cheek and Allan Glassman and soprano Christina Bouras of the New York City Opera. SOJOURNER for ten players, commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, was also premiered on this occasion.

In February, 2008, Spratlan completed his latest opera, WINK: AN ARCHITECT’S SOUNDING SPACES, based on the life and works of the great architect Louis Kahn. The libretto, by Jenny Kallick, is inspired by the film “My Architect,” by Kahn’s son Nathaniel, and probes Kahn’s obsessive quest for a kind of monumental perfection in architecture and its cost to his personal life. Intimate in scale, the opera is being prepared for release in a video, to be exhibited at numerous of Kahn’s buildings, as well as staged performances.

The Albany CD "When Crows Gather and Other Works" was released in February of 2005 and was named one of the five best classical CD's of the year by critic Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times. Other Spratlan works appear on the Koch International Classic, Opus One, Gasparo, and Oxingale labels, and IN MEMORIAM and STREAMING was released in the Spring of 2009 on the new Navona Label, together with widespread internet presentation and PDF’s of study scores.

On July 24, 2010, LIFE IS A DREAM was given its complete staged premiere at the Santa Fe Opera, with John Cheek reprising his leading role. Mr. Tommasini’s New York Times review rejoiced that “it is finally possible to experience this mystical, challenging and viscerally dramatic opera” and hailed it an “an important opera, the rare philosophical work that holds the stage and gives singing actors real characters to grapple with.”

Spratlan lives with his wife Melinda in Amherst, Massachusetts, and at their home in the Berkshires, where he maintains his studio.

JOSEPH SCHWANTNER

Born in Chicago in 1943, Joseph Schwantner received his musical and academic training at the Chicago Conservatory and Northwestern University. While developing a profile as a leading American composer, he also served on the faculties of The Juilliard School, Eastman School of Music and the Yale School of Music, simultaneously establishing himself as a sought after composition instructor.

Schwantner’s compositional career has been marked by numerous distinctions and awards. His early accolades include three BMI Student Composer Awards, the Bearns Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and many other awards, grants and fellowships. In 1979 his orchestral composition Aftertones of Infinity won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1985 his life and music were the focus of a television documentary entitled Soundings, produced by WGBH in Boston for national broadcast. That same year his work, Magabunda “Four Poems of Agueda Pizarro,” recorded on Nonesuch Records by the St. Louis Symphony, was nominated for a 1985 Grammy Award in the category “Best New Classical Composition,” and his A Sudden Rainbow, also recorded on Nonesuch by the St. Louis Symphony, received a 1987 Grammy nomination for “Best Classical Composition.” Schwantner is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Schwantner’s Percussion Concerto, among the most often performed of contemporary concert works, was commissioned for the 150th anniversary season of the New York Philharmonic. He has also been commissioned by numerous other leading orchestras and organizations including the National Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, Chamber Music America, Fromm Music Foundation, Naumburg Foundation, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, among many others.

Schwantner has enjoyed particular success in the orchestral world. After winning the Pulitzer Prize for Aftertones of Infinity, Schwantner composed New Morning for the World: Daybreak of Freedom on words from Martin Luther King, Jr. for narrator and orchestra, which has since entered the standard repertory of orchestras nationwide. His Percussion Concerto has garnered over one hundred performances since its 1995 premiere and is one of the most performed concert works of the past decade. His music is noted for its deft implementation of luminous color and fluctuating rhythms in a dramatic and unique style, heard in such signature works as the Percussion Concerto, New Morning for the World, and Magabunda, among others. Schwantner’s recent work, Morning’s Embrace, was commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra and premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC on February 23, 2006. The Washington Post praised its “delicate timbres” and “unique and original” sound. His music has been championed by such conductors as Leonard Slatkin, Marin Alsop, Andrew Litton, Hugh Wolff and artists including Evelyn Glennie, Sharon Isbin and Anne Akiko Meyers, among many others.

In January 2007, the League of American Orchestras and Meet the Composer announced that Schwantner had been selected as the composer for the second cycle of the nation’s largest commissioning consortium of orchestras: Ford Made in America. Schwantner’s new work, entitled Chasing Light…, will receive its world premiere with the Reno Chamber Orchestra in September 2008.

Other recent projects for the composer include the world premiere by Eighth Blackbird in October 2006 of Rhiannon’s Blackbirds, which the group commissioned and included on their nine-month United States tour during the 2006–07 season. Schwantner composed a new flute quartet for the 25th anniversary season of Flute Force in 2007, and, further on, he will write a new concerto for three percussionists and orchestra as well as a concerto for oboe, flute, bassoon and string orchestra. Joseph Schwantner’s music is published by Schott Helicon.

DIANA McVEY

Diana McVey, sopranoThe versatile soprano is an artist whose consummate skills as both a singer and an actress have made her highly visible in opera, oratorio and as soloist with symphony orchestras. The beauty of her voice and intelligent artistry have also made her a much sought-after artist for both the standard repertoire and new works. She has sung leading roles with Opera Tampa, Opera Columbus, Lake George Opera Festival, Jacksonville Lyric Opera, Treasure Coast Opera, Opera Naples, Light Opera Oklahoma, Ocean State Lyric Opera, Salt Marsh Opera Company, Boston Academy of Music, Rhode Island Philharmonic, Opera Providence among others.

She was an apprentice artist with both the Sarasota Opera Company, where she covered the role of Olympia in The Tales of Hoffman, and the Lake George Opera Festival where she covered the role of Konstanze in The Abduction from the Seraglio. Ms. McVey was a finalist in the New England Regional Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and was heard on WGBH, Boston. She has appeared as soloist with the Florida West Coast Symphony, the Pioneer Valley Symphony, the Fairfield Country Chorale and Orchestra, the New Bedford Symphony, the Longwood Symphony, the Rhode Island Philharmonic, the Albany Symphony, and the Rhode Island Civic Chorale and Orchestra, among others.

In June 2006 Ms. McVey made her Carnegie Hall debut singing Mozart’s Requiem and Coronation Mass, and traveled to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, for a production of Carmen. Recent engagements include Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass and Mozart’s Coronation Mass at Carnegie Hall, productions of Die Fledermaus with Jacksonville Lyric Opera, La Cenerentola and Turandot with Opera Columbus, La Traviata with the Pioneer Valley Symphony, Carmina Burana, Bachianas Brasileiras No.5 with the Eastern Connecticut Symphony, Poulenc’s Gloria and Rossini’s Stabat Mater with the Fairfield County Chorale, La Rondine and The Merry Widow with Opera Tampa and Maestro Anton Coppola, and numerous opera galas. Upcoming engagements include an opera gala with the Waltham Philharmonic Orchestra, the Four Last Songs of Strauss with the RI College Symphony Orchestra, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 at the Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia.

DAVID KIDWELL

Conductor and composer David Kidwell has been Music Director and Conductor of the Holyoke Civic Symphony since 1997, serving longer than any other conductor in the orchestra's history. Under his leadership the orchestra has grown both in size and in ability. He has expanded the orchestra's commitment to education by adding educational concerts and partnership concerts with local school groups, and he has reinforced the orchestra's commitment to new music by commissioning seven new works and performing over forty pieces by ten living American composers. Kidwell is also the conductor of the Guilford Festival Orchestra in Vermont, an ensemble known for its performances of both contemporary music and chamber orchestra repertoire.

In addition to his orchestra duties, Kidwell is Minister of Music at the Edwards Church of Northampton, leading one of the most accomplished church music programs in Western Massachusetts.

Kidwell is also an active composer whose works have been performed throughout the United States. Music critic Clifton J. Noble wrote, "The ways he manipulates the melody, his unerring harmonic sense and perceptive scoring speak with the honest originality that is the hallmark of America's most revered composers." He has previously been commissioned by the Litchfield County Children's Chorus (CT), Fairborn St. Luke United Methodist Church (OH), Bowling Green Baptist Church (VA), the Alamanda Women's Chorus (CT), the Eagle Pipe Band (VA), and the Holyoke Civic Symphony. Kidwell's music has been published by Micropress, Lorenz, and MMB Music.

David Kidwell was raised in a music-loving family in Virginia, where he played piano, organ, trumpet, and violin. After musical studies in Virginia and Connecticut, he moved to the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. He was music director and pianist for the Broadway revue company Le Cabaret for six years and assistant conductor of the Pioneer Valley Symphony for five years. Kidwell has music directed over fifty musical and light opera productions by community theatre groups, including the 2004 Amherst Leisure Services production of The Secret Garden, which won first prize in the International Maytime Festival in Dundalk, Ireland. He was also presented with the prestigious 2004 Mary Washington College Young Alumnus Merit Award.

Guest conducting engagements include the Smith College Orchestra, the Commonwealth Opera Orchestra, th University of Mary Washington-Community Symphony Orchestra, the Maranatha Singers, the Valley Light Opera Orchestra, the Pioneer Valley Symphony Chorus, and the Old Post Road Orchestra.

David Kidwell holds a bachelor's degree in music from Mary Washington College and a master's degree in composition from The Hartt School. He has studied conducting at the Tanglewood Music Center, the South Carolina Conductors Institute, and privately with Melvin Strauss. Kidwell is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Broadcast Music International, the American Music Center, the American Federation of Musicians, the Conductors Guild, and the Leauge of American Orchestras.

KATERINA KRAMARCHUK

Katerina Kramarchuk was born in Kishinev, Moldova, in 1988 to a family of musicians. She studied at the music lyceum “Ciprian Porumbescu” in Kishinev (1994-2002). In 2002 her family moved to Portland, Oregon, where she became interested in jazz and began composing seriously. She graduated from Century High School in Hillsboro, Oregon, and was featured several times as a pianist in the popular “10 Grands” concerts. A composition student of Richard Danielpour and recipient of the Helen Airoff Dowling Scholarship at the Manhattan School of Music, she was then accepted at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she began studies in the 2010-11 academic year.

In September 2010 the Portland Chamber Orchestra gave the world premiere of Miss Kramarchuk’s “Homage to Chopin,” an orchestral ballet suite based on themes by that composer. The work was commissioned as part of the PCO’s celebration of the Chopin bicentennial.

LYNN KLOCK

Lynn Klock is in demand as a soloist, clinician, and teacher throughout North America and abroad. Of his New York debut in Carnegie Recital Hall, Peter G. Davis of the New York Times wrote, “Mr. Klock performed in the most skillful fashion...What impressed one most was how expertly Mr. Klock demonstrated the versatility of the instrument, its potential for weaving smooth legato lines, its flexible dynamic range from delicately whispered pianissimo to forceful dramatic statements without any loss of tonal quality, and its virtuoso ability to clearly articulate even the most rapid figures…. Lynn Klock assembled a program that had a considerable amount of expressive variety and sheer musical charm.” He has been a featured soloist in Russia, Eastern Europe, Great Britain, Canada, Singapore, and the British and American Virgin Islands. He also has the distinction of being the first saxophonist to be presented on the Warsaw Philharmonic Recital Series in Warsaw, Poland, and the first saxophonist to tour with Musicians from Marlboro. He is also the saxophonist and bass clarinetist with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra. For more than 30 years, he has been an enthusiastic participant in new music for the saxophone. He has premiered nearly 100 compositions and arrangements written for and dedicated to him, including solo works with piano, band, orchestra, chorus, and mixed chamber ensemble. His newest solo CD, “Connections,” released on Albany Records received acclaim in a review in Fanfare Magazine. This disk is a departure from Klock’s previous solo recordings, Vintage Flora, Aria, and Chant Corse in that all of the compositions on the CD are the result of friendships and musical collaborations with the composers (including Clifton J. Noble Jr. whose arrangement you will hear tonight), and were written specifically for Lynn or for one of his students. He can also be heard on the CRI, Gasparo, Mark, and Orion labels.

As a clinician, he has presented master classes at major national and international conferences as well as at educational institutions across the United States and overseas. Graduates of Professor Klock’s Saxophone Class at the University of Massachusetts Amherst hold positions in the professional service bands in Washington D.C. including The President’s Own, Army Field Band, West Point, and Army Jazz Knights, plus teaching positions in Great Britain, and at every level of education in this country.

A graduate of the University of Michigan, Interlochen Arts Academy, his principal teachers were Larry Teal, Donald Sinta, and Jack Kripl.

CLIFTON J. NOBLE, JR.

Clifton J. Noble, Jr. began to play piano and guitar at age 5, taught by his father, who encouraged him to write music shortly thereafter. His studies at Amherst College (B. A. 1983) and Smith College (M.A. 1988) focused on music composition and English literature. Composition teachers included Lewis Spratlan at Amherst and Donald Wheelock at Smith.

Since 1987 he has served as pianist for Smith College choral ensembles; he currently holds the position of Staff Accompanist in the Smith Music Department. Many of his compositions, including Pastorale, A Tonic of Wilderness, Windows of the Morning, and numerous arrangements of folk songs and spirituals have been written for Smith choirs. His original choral compositions and arrangements have been performed by choruses throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

He has been commissioned by acclaimed soloists and ensembles, including the Springfield Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Assabet Valley Mastersingers, the Holyoke Civic Symphony Orchestra, the Pioneer Valley Symphony Orchestra, Music in Deerfield, the Florentine Trio, saxophonist Lynn Klock, baritone Donald Boothman, the Canticle Singers of Baltimore, the Bel Canto Singers of Nevada, the Cooperating Colleges of Greater Springfield, Young Singers of Greater Westfield, the Children's Chorus of Springfield, and the Western MA Young People's Philharmonia. Other singular commissions include Parting Words, a cantata celebrating the tercentenary of Northampton minister Jonathan Edwards, and Five Choral Haiku, premiered February 28 at the 2004 Five College Choral Festival at Smith College's John M. Greene Hall.

Encounter for orchestra and narrator, commissioned by the Springfield Symphony Orchestra in collaboration with author Jane Yolen, was premiered on April 28, 2008. He also collaborated with Yolen to set the text of her book Johnny Appleseed for chamber ensemble, children's choir, and narrator in the fall of 2008. His Champlain 400, for string quartet and narrator, was commissioned by the Adirondack Chapter of The Nature Conservancy to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Samuel de Champlain's explorations of Lake Champlain. His arrangement of the African-American spiritual Go Down Moses was premiered at Alden Baptist Church in Springfield in 2008 by the combined Mak'hela and Freedom Choirs, under the direction of Kayla Werlin. Mak'hela also performed Go Down Moses at the 2010 Zimriya World Assembly of Choirs in Israel. Tidings of Great Joy was commissioned by the Smith College Glee Club and Chorus and was premiered at the December 2009 Vespers service at the college. In October 2010, the Holyoke Civic Symphony premiered Marching In, a concerto for jazz trio and orchestra.

With clarinetist Bob Sparkman, he enjoys playing traditional jazz, and the duo has recorded seven CDs of their favorite tunes, Good Talks, Still Talkin', Talkin' It Over, Sweet Talk, Something Mellow, Something Blue, Bob and Jerry LIVE, and Thanks a Million. They have also collaborated with bassist Genevieve Rose and drummer Richard Mayer on Mayer's CD Vermont Songbook.

A CD of Noble's Sonatas for Violin and Piano was released in 2006 by Gasparo Records. De Profundis, a sonata for baritone saxophone and piano (commissioned by Lynn Klock) is included on Klock's Albany Records CD entitled Connections, which was released in 2010. Klock also commissioned Caneuon Cymru, the suite of Welsh folksongs that receives its February 12, 2011.

Noble is a highly regarded keyboard performer in the Pioneer Valley. He has served as organist and choir director at both Edwards Church in Northampton and Blessed Sacrament Church in Greenfield, and taught general music to students in grades K-6 at Holy Trinity School in Greenfield. He accompanied the Young Singers of Greater Westfield for 10 years, and regularly accompanies student performances in the Westfield Public Schools and throughout the Five Colleges.
Noble also writes classical music reviews and features for the Springfield Republican. He resides in Western Massachusetts with wife Kara and daughter Samantha.

NATHANIEL STOOKEY

At 17, Nathaniel Stookey was the youngest composer ever commissioned for the San Francisco Symphony’s New and Unusual Music Series. His compositions have since been programmed and commissioned by many of the world’s great orchestras, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Carnegie Hall, the Toronto Symphony, the Hallé Orchestra, and the Sinfonieorchester des Norddeutschen Rundfunks (NDR), among many others.

In 1993, upon graduating form the University of California at Berkeley, Stookey was awarded the first Hallé Orchestra Composition Fellowship, serving as resident composer under Kent Nagano from 1993 to 1996 and producing a wide range of works including the gamelan-inspired Tame Me and Colliding with Chris, which was a (London) Times Critic’s Choice in 1995. In 1999, Stookey’s concerto for two violins and string orchestra, Double, was the millennium commission for Music in the Round’s Festival of 999 Years of Music in Sheffield, England.

In 2000, having returned to the United States, Stookey received a three-year New Residencies Award from Meet The Composer to serve as composer-in-residence with the North Carolina Symphony, The Ciompi Quartet, and NPR affiliate WUNC-FM, while simultaneously completing a doctorate at Duke University. That partnership drew national press attention with over sixty performances of five new and three exisiting works, including Big Bang for the opening of Meymandi Hall; Wide as Skies for the centennial of the first manned flight (which was immediately taken up by the Philadelphia Orchestra); and Out of the Everywhere, “a lushly beautiful evocation of the birth of his children,” according to Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle.

In 2006, the San Francisco Symphony, with which Stookey has maintained a close relationship, commissioned, premiered, and recorded The Composer is Dead, a sinister guide to the orchestra with narration by Lemony Snicket. “Having created a furor in the United States” (Hamburger Abendblatt), the work was performed twice back-to-back to sellout crowds at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s New Creations Festival, conducted by Peter Oundjian, and has since been performed by over thirty orchestras around the world. In 2009, Frederica von Stade launched her farewell tour with Stookey’s Into the Bright Lights, a setting of three of her own texts, in both orchestral and recital versions.

In addition to works for conventional ensembles, Stookey has continued to attract new audiences with music that challenges the established boundaries of classical music. In 2007, Junkestra, for an orchestra of objects scavenged at the San Francisco dump, drew thousands of listeners to warehouses, public squares, and YouTube before being taken up by the San Francisco Symphony and other classical presenters. That same year, Stookey contributed original music for string quintet to The Mars Volta’s Grammy-winning album The Bedlam in Goliath. In 2010, he contributed the score to Tony-award winning director John Doyle’s new production of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.

Stookey holds degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and Duke University, where he was a Mary Duke Biddle Fellow and was awarded the Klenz Prize during his first year of graduate study. His principal teachers were Peter Scott Lewis, Donald Erb, Andrew Imbrie, Cindy Cox, George Benjamin, Stephen Jaffe, and Scott Lindroth. Concurrently with his orchestral residencies, Stookey served on the faculties of the University of Sheffield (UK) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where, from 1998 to 2003, he was artistic director and host of Composers-in-Context, a broadcast new music series for NPR affiliate WUNC-FM.

In 2005, Albany Records released Stookey’s Music for Strings (1992-2002), featuring The Ciompi Quartet and the strings of the North Carolina Symphony. In 2006, the Chamber Music Partnership released Fling, for flute and string quartet, as part of its live anthology, "San Francisco Premieres." A New York Times bestselling picture-book including the San Francisco Symphony’s recording of The Composer is Dead, narrated by Lemony Snicket and conducted by Edwin Outwater, was released in March 2009 by Harper Collins. A recording of Junkestra by members of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra has recently been released on Innova records. Stookey’s music is published by Associated Music Publishers, with four early works available in print from PRB Productions.

AMHERST BALLET COMPANY

Amherst Ballet, established in 1972, has maintained a solid reputation of serving the community through excellence in dance training and high quality performances. Our curriculum offers a solid foundation in classical ballet with electives that enable our students to be well-rounded dancers. This year, our students (ages 12 - 18) auditioned for and were accepted to the following prestigious dance programs both for summer and full-year study: The Ailey School, American Ballet Theatre Summer Intensive (NYC), Boston Ballet School, Bolshoi Academy, Joffrey Ballet School, Kirov Academy of Ballet (Washington, D.C.), Nutmeg Conservatory, North Carolina School of the Arts, School of the Richmond Ballet, Walnut Hill School, and the Virginia School for the Arts.

Amherst Ballet believes in collaborating with local artists as well as art and educational institutions to create great performances. Recent collaborators include the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, the Hampshire Young People's Chorus, the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Smith College Orchestra, Moscow Ballet, publisher Barefoot Books and authors Jane Yolen and Heidi Stemple, as well as a number of local composers and musicians. Our recent touring performances have taken us to local venues and beyond. Last May, we were hired by the New York Botanical Gardens to perform excerpts from our original ballet Emily of Amherst, which we performed outdoors for over 1000 audience members. Other recent venues include Springfield Symphony Hall, American International College in Springfield and numerous local schools.