George Tsontakis
His recent premieres have included concertos for Evelyn Glennie, with the National Symphony at Carnegie Hall, and for Hornist David Jolley in Santa Fe, as well as October, a work for the Baltimore Symphony. He served as Composer-in-Residence with the Oxford (England) Philomusica from 1998-2002, and is scheduled to compose concertos for violinist Steven Copes and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and for pianist Stephen Hough and the Dallas Symphony, the Deutsches Symponie and the Athens State Orchestra. Recent commissions include a new work to inaugurate the Aspen Music Festival's acclaimed Benedict Music Tent as well as a violin concerto for Cho-Liang Lin with the Oregon and Albany Symphonies. He has composed works for the American, Blair, Colorado and Emerson string quartets, Da Camera of Houston, the American Brass Quintet, Newband, Orpheus, flutist Ransom Wilson, violinist Glenn Dicterow, violist Lawrence Dutton with pianist Misha Dichter, the New York Virtuoso Singers, the Broyhill Chamber ensemble, the Aspen Wind Quintet, Aureole and several American orchestras and ensembles. Mr. Tsontakis has twice been a winner of Kennedy Center Awards - in 1989 for String Quartet No. 4 and in 1992 for the orchestral work Perpetual Angelus. He studied composition with Roger Sessions at Juilliard and conducting with Jorge Mester, and has directed the Riverside Orchestra and the Metropolitan Greek Chorale. A faculty member of the Aspen Music School since 1976, he was the founding director of the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble from 1991 until 1998. His music has been recorded on the Hyperion, New World, CRI, Koch and Opus One labels and is published exclusively by Theodore Presser. |
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Recipient of the American Academy's prestigious award for lifetime achievement in 1995, George Tsontakis spent the first half of 2002 at the American Academy in Berlin with the 2002 Berlin Prize (Alberto Vilar Fellowship). His catalogue continues to grow dramatically as prominent orchestras and musicians commission and record new works. The Millennium season alone brought performances to a dozen European countries in such venues as Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, Berlin's Philharmonic Hall, London's Queen Elizabeth and Wigmore Halls, Oxford's Sheldonian, Radio France, Auditorium Bank de Luxembourg, Athens' Megharon and Oslo's Gamle Logen. In the late 1990s, six CDs representing his works were released, including his acclaimed Four Symphonic Quartets with James DePreist and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo on the Koch label, and pianist Stephen Hough's monumental Hyperion recording of the epic Ghost Variations, nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, and the only Classical recording cited in TIME magazine's 1998 Top Ten Recordings. Two new recordings of his piano chamber music will be released on Koch and Arabesque featuring the Broyhill Chamber Ensemble and Da Camera of Houston.
