B&H News Wire - Honors and Awards
(December 2007)Benjamin Lees recently donated his entire archive to Yale University’s Irving S. Gilmore Library. The comprehensive archive includes manuscript sketches and scores for all of Lees’s compositions, correspondence, concert programs and reviews, photographs, and biographical materials. Included in this gift is Lees’s Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra, which was praised by Strings magazine this year: “What makes this concerto such an outstanding model of the form is not just the way Lees fashions his musical material into a tightly knit whole, but also the success with which he elevates the orchestral component to the level of an equal partner.”
In October, the National Endowment for the Arts named Andrew Hill (1931-2007) a 2008 NEA Jazz Master, in a press conference at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola. Hill was memorialized in a musical tribute this past September at St. Peter’s Church in New York City, and his work lives on at Boosey & Hawkes, with first-ever printed scores of masterpieces under way.
Gearing up for Elliott Carter’s Centenary Year (2008), James Levine led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the world premiere of Carter’s Horn Concerto (Nov. 15), commissioned by the orchestra for principal hornist James Sommerville. Following up the premiere, which The Boston Globe called “striking” and “surprisingly lyrical,” the BSO presented Carter with the Mark M. Horblit Award for distinguished composition by an American composer.
Miller Theater gave Carter a delightful 99th birthday present in December, with the New York staged premiered of his one-and-only opera, What Next?, which The New York Times hailed as “audaciously complex,” asserting that “the sheer visceral impact, endless variety and myriad colorings make it effectively dramatic.” After the final performance, which landed squarely on Carter’s 99th birthday, the entire house stood in the composer's presence to sing “Happy Birthday, Mr. Carter.”
For more information on any of these composers, please contact composers.us@boosey.com
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