New Peabody Symphony Orchestra CD
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The Peabody Symphony Orchestra’s second commercial recording in four years was released this month on the NAXOS label. Highlighting the music of composer Aaron Jay Kernis, the CD features flute soloist and Peabody professor Marina Piccinini and conductors Marin Alsop, Peabody director of graduate conducting and music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and Leonard Slatkin, music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Piccinini is featured in the world premiere recording of Kernis’ Flute Concerto, which was co-commissioned for her by the Peabody Institute and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, among others. Alsop led the performance and recording of the other work on the CD, Kernis’ Second Symphony, in October 2016. The Peabody Symphony Orchestra’s new all-Kernis recording is available for purchase at
NAXOS.
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As we welcomed back returning faculty and students, and welcomed new members to our community at convocation, I was again struck by what makes Peabody truly remarkable. First and foremost, it is our outstanding faculty. Students come to Peabody to work with some of the best artists and pedagogues in the world. Over the past several years we have hired an unprecedented more than 80 new faculty, including 25 this fall. This is the inaugural year for the Peabody Conservatory’s new rank and promotion system, providing another important way to recognize our faculty and benchmark important progress in their careers. Seventy faculty members applied for and received non-tenured rankings of professor, associate professor, assistant professor, and instructor. This year Peabody is also more diverse in its faculty than ever before with 11% identifying as underrepresented minorities, as compared with 6.5% just two years ago. That’s nearly three times the average for faculty diversity at comparable schools nationally.
Similarly, the students here at Peabody are among the most talented in the world. This year we have a record enrollment at Peabody with 680 students, and it is the most diverse group in our history with more than 95 underrepresented minority students – 14% of our total student body and representing a 60% increase since 2015. This is important because the future of the performing arts will depend on a much more diverse audience than exists today, and that will only happen when we increase the diversity of the performers on our stages throughout our industry. We should be proud that Peabody is at the forefront of an existential imperative for our field – we are committed to turning out the best and most diverse group of professional performing artists among our peers.
As you can see, we are off and running with the start of the 2019-20 academic year. I look forward to further updates as the year progresses.
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Sunday, September 22, 4:00 pm
The
Washington Bach Consort will present “A Royal Occasion: Handel’s Coronation Anthems and Bach’s Trauerode,” a program featuring faculty artists Risa Browder, John Moran, and Margaret Owens; alumni Katelyn Aungst (
MM ‘19, Historical Performance Voice), Wade Davis (
MM ‘11, GPD ‘13, Baroque Violoncello), and Anthony Harvey (
MM ‘07, Guitar; MM ‘10, Theorbo); and master’s historical performance candidate Cameron Welke, lute. The performance will take place at the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C.
Wednesday, September 25, 8:00 pm
Peabody Jazz partners with Baltimore’s An Die Musik Live! to present the first of the Peabody Jazz Composers Monthly Forum series. Once a month on Wednesday evenings, audiences will have the opportunity to listen in on the creative processes of many of today’s most promising young artists. Tickets and more information at
AnDieMusikLive.com.
Thursday, September 26, 7:30 pm
The Peabody Symphony Orchestra’s first performance of the 2019-20 season will be live streamed. Led by Joseph Young, Ruth Blaustein Rosenberg Artistic Director of Ensembles, the orchestra will perform Georges Bizet’s
Carmen, Suite No. 1; Manuel de Falla’s
El sombrero de tres picos (
The Three-Cornered Hat), Suite No. 1; and Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2, Op. 30, "Romantic." The concert can be viewed live on the
Peabody Institute website.
Friday, September 27- Monday, September 30
The
Oregon Symphony will premiere Composition Department Chair and Professor Oscar Bettison’s
Remaking a Forest, commissioned by the symphony. The recent Notre Dame Cathedral fire in April was an inspiration for the piece. “The Forest” is the nickname for Notre Dame’s attic, and Bettison was fascinated with how Notre Dame will be restored.
Saturday, September 28, 7:30 pm; Sunday, October 6, 2:00 pm
Baritone Rob McGinness (
MM ‘17, Voice) will perform the role of Frank Lloyd Wright with the
Arizona Opera in the world premiere of composer Daron Hagen's “Taliesin West Version” of
Shining Brow. The opera is the story of visionary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s early life at Taliesin West, his home in Arizona. Performances will take place in both Phoenix and Tucson.
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Peabody Notes highlights select off-campus or live-streamed performances featuring Peabody performers. For other events, please visit our Peabody Conservatory Facebook
page
. For the complete weekly list of concerts at Peabody, subscribe to
Events at Peabody
or visit
peabody.jhu.edu/events
.
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Professor Manuel Barrueco (
BM ‘75, Guitar) was inducted into the Guitar Foundation of America’s Hall of Fame, recognizing musicians across the globe who have made extraordinary contributions to the classical guitar in our time. The GFA’s journal
Soundboard featured Barrueco in its June issue with tributes from Martha Masters, David Tanenbaum, and Graham Wade.
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Todd Craven (
GPD ‘18, Conducting) won the top prize in the Los Angeles Conducting Competition in June. He will be the featured conductor in a concert in Brazil with the Orquestra Filarmônica de Goiás in the 2020-21 season as a part of his prize.
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Zach Gulaboff Davis (
MM
‘
19, Music Theory Pedagogy; DMA
‘
19, Composition
) won The American Prize in Composition (vocal chamber music) professional division for his piece
Opaque Etchings
. The American Prize was also awarded to Symphony Number One, comprised primarily of Peabody alumni, as the 2019 grand prize winner in orchestral performance for its 2017-18 season.
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Preparatory student Rory Powell, who is a student of Michaela Trnkova, attended Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan last summer. Powell was the principal harpist for the Interlochen Philharmonic, and then principal harpist of Interlochen's top orchestra, the World Youth Symphony Orchestra.
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Doctoral candidate Tomasz Robak (
MM ‘15, Piano) has been appointed to the music faculty at Davidson College in North Carolina as full-time artist associate in accompanying. He is serving as choral, vocal, and instrumental accompanist for Davidson’s Music Department.
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David William Ross (
MM ‘08, GPD ‘10, Guitar), a classical and jazz guitarist, has released an album of solo guitar works by Akira Nakada, Astor Piazzolla, Frank Wallace, and Leo Brouwer on Ravello Records.
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Ben Lougheed (
BM ‘13, Guitar) has released his first album, shaped by the incredible coincidence that occurred in 1685 when three of the most prominent composers that Europe has ever seen were born within eight months of each other.
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The Baltimore Consort, featuring Mark Cudek (
MM ‘82, Lute), Ronn McFarlane (
‘79, Guitar), and Mindy Rosenfeld (
BM ‘80, Flute), released its first CD on a commercial label in 10 years. The group, founded in 1980, performs the instrumental music of Shakespeare’s time on this CD.
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Alex Fournier (
GPD ‘16, Jazz) released a premiere recording for his sextet Triio that features original music in the jazz/creative idiom. Triio has grown from a quartet featuring Canadian composers and modern jazz to a sextet featuring long-form music composed by Fournier.
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