CSM Guest Artists

John Corigliano, Composer

The American John Corigliano continues to add to one of the richest, most unusual, and most widely celebrated bodies of work any composer has created over the last forty years. Corigliano's scores, now numbering over one hundred, have won him the Pulitzer Prize, the Grawemeyer Award, three Grammy Awards, and an Academy Award (“Oscar”) and have been performed and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world. Attentive listening to this music reveals an unconfined imagination, one which has taken traditional notions like "symphony" or "concerto" and redefined them in a uniquely transparent idiom forged as much from the post-war European avant garde as from his American forebears.

Perhaps one of the most important symphonists of his era, Corigliano has to date written three symphonies, each a landscape unto itself. Scored simultaneously for wind orchestra and a multitude of wind ensembles, Corigliano's ambitious, extravagant, and grandly barbarous Symphony No. 3: Circus Maximus (2004) was commissioned by the University of Texas at Austin Wind Ensemble, who presented it on their 2008 tour in Europe and gave its New York première in 2005 at Carnegie Hall. Naxos releases its stereo recording of Circus Maximus in January 2009, and has chosen the work as its début recording in its upcoming Blu-Ray format. Symphony No. 2 (2001), a rethinking and expansion of the surreal and virtuosic String Quartet (1995), was introduced by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2000 and earned him the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Symphony No. 1 (1991), commissioned by Meet the Composer for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when he was composer-in-residence, channeled Corigliano's personal grief over the loss of friends to the AIDS crisis into music of immense power, color, drama, and scope: performed worldwide by over 150 orchestras and twice recorded, this symphony earned him the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.

Corigliano’s theatricality, at once thoughtful and innate, has vivified his eight concerti: his most recent concerto is Conjurer (2008), for percussion and string orchestra. Commissioned by an international consortium of six orchestras for Evelyn Glennie, Conjurer was introduced by the Pittsburgh Symphony in the 2007-2008 season, when the orchestra designated him its Composer of the Year. For Joshua Bell, Corigliano composed Concerto for Violin and Orchestra: The Red Violin (2005.) Developed from the themes of the score to the François Girard’s film of the same name, which won Corigliano an Oscar in 1999, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was introduced by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, under Marin Alsop and recorded by them in 2007. Vocalise (2000), an unusual singlemovement wordless concerto for voice, orchestra, and electronics, was commissioned for the millennium by the New York Philharmonic: Kurt Masur led Sylvia McNair in the work’s première. Guitarist Sharon Isbin and the St. Paul Chamber Symphony under Hugh Wolff introduced Troubadours in 1994: flutist James Galway and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Myung-Whun Chung gave the first Pied Piper Fantasy in 1982. Corigliano’s kinetic and elegant Piano Concerto (1967) in which Victor Alessandro led Hilde Somer and the San Antonio Symphony was his first essay in the genre; but the composer credits his first two concerti for solo winds with changing both his art and his career. It was during the composition of the Oboe Concerto (1975; Humbert Lucarelli, oboe: Kazuyoshi Akiyama, American Composers Orchestra) and, especially, the Clarinet Concerto (1977) that he first used the “architectural” method of composing which empowers him to forge a strikingly wide range of musical materials into arches of compelling aural logic: the première of the Clarinet Concerto, with Stanley Drucker and the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein, was by contemporary accounts the musical event of the year.

While he has composed three large-scale works for voice and orchestra, Corigliano’s lone opera to date is The Ghosts of Versailles (1991), which counterposes the fiction of Mozart and Beaumarchais with the Reign of Terror to create a richly multilayered meditation on the need for, and costs of, personal and social change. The Metropolitan Opera's first commission in three decades, The Ghosts of Versailles succeeded brilliantly with both critics and audiences: the season it opened, Corigliano was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and Musical America named him its first-ever "Composer of the Year." After triumphs in Chicago, Houston, and Hannover, Germany, The Ghosts of Versailles returns to the American stage in a newly orchestrated smaller version in June 2009: first scheduled by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, the production includes stops in Vancouver and the Wexford Festival on a lengthening list of future engagements. Corigliano's two other major vocal works show a comparably lavish and powerful sense of vocal theatre. Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan (2000) boldly refashions texts by the iconic songwriter into a compelling monodrama, by turns savage, yearning, and hallucinatory; begun as a song cycle for piano and soprano in 2000, Corigliano rescored the piece for full orchestra and amplified soprano in 2004. Its Naxos recording, on which JoAnne Falletta leads the Buffalo Philharmonic, was released in September 2008 and garnered Grammy nominations both for the work itself and for its leading interpreter, the soprano Hila Plitmann. A Dylan Thomas Trilogy (1960, rev. 1999) revisits and combines three of Corigliano's earlier settings of this poet — Fern Hill (1960), Poem in October (1970), and Poem on His Birthday (1976) — with the late Author’s Prologue into a "memory play in the form of an oratorio." Scored for boy soprano, tenor, baritone, chorus, and orchestra, A Dylan Thomas Trilogy was recorded in spring 2008 with Leonard Slatkin conducting Sir Thomas Allen and the Nashville Symphony and Chorus: it was released by Naxos in November 2008.

Corigliano is one of the few living composers to have a string quartet named for him: its young players banded together after an Indiana University performance of his String Quartet (1995,) which Corigliano wrote as a valedictory commission for the Cleveland Quartet and which won him that year’s Grammy Award for best contemporary composition. His first chamber score, his Violin Sonata (1964) is now a standard of the American violinist’s repertory, having been performed hundreds of times and recorded dozens since the Spoleto Festival awarded the piece first prize in its inaugural Chamber Music Competition: his newest is Winging It: Improvisations for Solo Piano (2008), to be introduced by Ursula Oppens in February 2009. It joins in his keyboard catalogue the virtuoso showpieces Etude Fantasy (1976) and Fantasia on an Ostinato (1985) for solo piano, and the unique Chiaroscuro (1997), for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart. Also upcoming is the August 2009 première in Sydney, Australia, of Corigliano’s new arrangement of Mr. Tambourine Man (2009) for voice and Pierrot ensemble, which, like the version of Poem on His Birthday for tenor and eight instruments (1970), casts these orchestral pieces for chamber ensemble with no loss of force. Phantasmagoria (2000), revisits themes from The Ghosts of Versailles for cello and piano; Fancy on a Bach Air (1996) varies Bach for solo cello. His earliest songs form the cycle The Cloisters, (1965) written with William M. Hoffman, who also wrote the libretto to The Ghosts of Versailles: his latest are a trio of Cabaret Songs to the lyrics of opera composer-librettist Mark Adamo (End of the Line, Marvelous Invention, and Dodecaphonia (or, They Call Her Twelve-Tone Rose) introduced by William Bolcom and Joan Morris.

Corigliano serves on the composition faculty at the Juilliard School of Music and holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Music at Lehman College, City University of New York, which has established a scholarship in his name. Born in 1938 to John Corigliano Sr., a former concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, and Rose Buzen, an accomplished pianist and educator, Corigliano has lived in New York City all his life: for the past fourteen years he and his partner, Mark Adamo, have divided their time between Manhattan and Kent Cliffs, New York.

Hai-Ye Ni, Cellist

One of the most accomplished young cellists of our time, Hai-Ye Ni is the principal cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Miss Ni first came into prominence via her critically praised New York debut at Alice Tully Hall in 1991. This noted performance came as a result of Miss Ni capturing the first prize at the Naumburg International Cello Competition in 1990. She is also the first prize winner of the International Paulo Cello Competition in Finland, and a recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant.

Hai-Ye has soloed with many orchestras such as the San Francisco Symphony, the Vienna Chamber Orchestra, National Orchestra de Paris, the Finnish Radio Symphony, and the Shanghai Symphony. She made her debut with the Chicago Symphony in 1997 under the baton of Christophe Eschenbach. That same year, she performed a 14-city U.S. tour of a new concerto by Bright Sheng, "Two Poems", for cello and Chinese traditional instruments.

Hai-Ye has performed recitals at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Smithsonian Institute, and the Wallace Collection in London. In 2004, she gave a solo recital at Weill Hall at Carnegie featuring works by contemporary women composers Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and Chen Yi. Hai-Ye has performed at the 92nd Street Y, Spoleto Festival, Ravinia Festival, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival, La Jolla SummerFest, Kuhmo Festival in Finland, and the Pablo Casals Festival in France.

She has collaborated with renowned artists such as Pinchas Zukerman, Yefim Bronfman, Leonidas Kavakos, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Joshua Bell, Lynn Harrel, Christian Tetzlaff, and members of the Emerson Quartet. In 2009, she performed with Lang Lang at Carnegie Hall for their Chinese festival, "Ancient Paths, Modern Voices: A Festival Celebrating Chinese Culture".

From 1999 to 2006, Ms. Ni was the associate principal cellist for the New York Philharmonic. During her tenure, she collaborated with Bobby McFerrin in the Vivaldi Concerto for two cellos, and made her solo debut with the orchestra in 2003.

Hai-Ye's performances have been broadcast throughout the U.S. on National Public Radio. She won the best performance prize of Tchaikovsky from the Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow. Hai-Ye was featured on the ABC television show "20/20". She was the cover story in 1997 of Strings magazine and was featured in the book 21st Century Cellists.

Her solo CD on Naxos was chosen CD of the week by Classic FM, London. Hai-Ye was a participant at Marlboro Music Festival and a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center II. She was featured on Philadelphia Orchestra's Shostakovich CD on Ondine. Hai-Ye has a new CD to be released on Delos with Cho-Liang Lin and Helen Huang, featuring piano trios by the Chinese composer Zhou Long.

Born in Shanghai, China, Hai-Ye began her cello studies with her mother and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. After moving to the U.S., she studied with Irene Sharp at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Joel Krosnick at the Juilliard School of Music, and William Pleeth in London.

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