Cellist Wendy Sutter received degrees from both the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School. A native of Seattle, she made her solo debut with the Seattle Symphony at age sixteen. Awarded the first prize in the Juilliard cello competition, Ms Sutter made her New York solo concerto debut at Avery Fisher Hall in the New York premiere of Kaddish for cello and orchestra by composer David Diamond.
Sophie Hutchings is Australian pianist and composer. Having begun playing piano young growing up in a musical family, Sophie started writing properly in her teens. Sophie’s compositions move from disarmingly spare and elegant beginnings to curl out with a tingling edge, propelling its austerity into urgent and epic realms. Violin, cello, drums, percussion and organ heighten the flight these pieces can take as well as dip and swell within the more dimly lit moods of gentler nuance, casting a particular spell across the range of feeling captured in Sophie’s playing.
Melbourne has the longest continuous history of orchestral music of any Australian city and the MSO is the oldest professional orchestra in Australia, celebrating its centenary in 2007.
The MSO performs to more than 250,000 people in Melbourne and regional Victoria in over 150 concerts a year. The Orchestra has performed with renowned artists such as Igor Stravinsky, Mariss Jansons, Isaac Stern, Yehudi Menuhin, Jessye Norman, Artur Rubinstein, Mstislav Rostropovich, Hakan Hagegard, Geoffrey Lancaster, Emanuel Ax, Jeffrey Tate, Sumi Jo, and Nigel Kennedy.
Thomas Adès (born in London, 1 March 1971) is a British composer, pianist and conductor. Adès studied piano with Paul Berkowitz and later composition with Robert Saxton at Guildhall School,London. He graduated in 1992 from King's College, Cambridge after studying with Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway. His degree was classified as "double starred first", indicating outstanding academic distinction. He was made Britten Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music, and in 2004 was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Essex.
Arthur Jeffes has brought together a group of musicians to create Music from the Penguin Café, playing the music of his father, Simon Jeffes and the Penguin Cafe Orchestra and combining it with his own compositions. The ensemble that Arthur has drawn together are about the same age as the original members of the PCO when they first started playing together in the late 1970s. Music from the Penguin Café began touring from June 2009 into the early autumn, playing at festivals, concert venues, clubs and parties.
Philip Glass (born January 31, 1937) is a composer from the United States. His music is frequently described as minimalist, though he prefers to describe himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures". Although his early, mature music is minimalist, he has evolved stylistically. Currently, he describes himself as a "Classicist", pointing out that he is trained in harmony and counterpoint and studied Franz Schubert, Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with Nadia Boulanger.
Bang on a Can is a multi-faceted musical organization based in New York City. It was founded in 1987 by three American composers who remain its artistic directors: Julia Wolfe, David Lang, and Michael Gordon. It is a major force in the presentation of new concert music, and has presented hundreds of musical events worldwide. The San Francisco Chronicle has called Bang on a Can "the country's most important vehicle for contemporary music."
Kronos Quartet is a string quartet founded by violinist David Harrington in 1973. Since 1978, the quartet has been based in San Francisco, California. The longest-running combination of performers (1978–1999) had Harrington and John Sherba on violin, Hank Dutt on viola and Joan Jeanrenaud on cello. Jennifer Culp replaced Jeanrenaud on cello in 1999. Jeffrey Zeigler replaced Culp on cello in 2005.
See The Sand Pebbles
David Nathaniel Baker, Jr. (born 1931) is a native of Indianapolis, Indiana and currently holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Music and Chairman of the Jazz Department at the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana. A virtuosic performer on multiple instruments and top in his field in several disciplines, Baker has taught and performed throughout the USA, Canada, Europe, Scandinavia, New Zealand and Japan.