Richard Festinger: Then and Now

Richard Festinger

Richard Festinger has been a prominent and highly regarded figure in American contemporary music since the early 1980’s. An early interest in jazz in the 1970’s took him to Boston, where he worked with Gary Burton, Herb Pomeroy and Mick Goodrick at the Berklee School of Music, and he subsequently led his own groups as a jazz performer in the San Francisco Bay area before studying composition with Andrew Imbrie at the University of California in Berkeley.

Festinger’s work as a composer, comprising more than 80 compositions across a wide variety of genres, has been widely recognized for its elegance and emotive power. Frank J. Oteri, writing for the 2011 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, describes Festinger’s music as “notable for its combination of propulsive energy with an impeccable sense of poise and balance.” In his article on Festinger’s recordings in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Joshua Levine writes of Festinger’s work as “vibrant, skillfully wrought... intellectually and viscerally compelling music.” WQXR Radio has called him “an American master.”

The numerous awards and honors that have accrued to him include major commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Aaron Copland Fund for music, the Argosy and Barlow Foundations, the Philadelphia Music Project, and the American Composers Forum. He is a recipient of the George Ladd Grand Prix de Paris, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters has twice recognized his work, with both the Walter Hinrichsen Award and an Academy Recording Award.

Some notable recent commissions include his String Quartet No. 3 (2015), commissioned by the Serge Koussevitzky Foundation for the Afiara Quartet; Cummings Settings (2016), written for the Resonant Bodies Festival in New York; the song cycle Careless Love (2017) written for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players; Icarus in Flight (2018), commissioned by the Climate Music Project for the Telegraph String Quartet; the cantata for chorus and chamber orchestra Worlds Apart (2020), written for the Boston Cantata Singers; and his String Quartet No. 5 (2021).

A longtime resident of Northern California, in 1985 Festinger founded the well-known San Francisco based contemporary music ensemble Earplay, which he continues to direct. In 1990 he joined the music faculty of San Francisco State University as professor of music theory and composition, and served from 2010 to 2018 as Artistic Director of the Morrison Artists Series, San Francisco’s longest established presenter of professional chamber music concerts. He serves on the boards of Earplay, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Irving M. Klein International String Competition, and the League of Composers/International Society for Contemporary music. More recordings of his works are available on the Bridge, Centaur, CRI, CRS and Naxos International labels.

Calefax Reed Quintet

Calefax is a close-knit ensemble of five reed players united by a shared passion. For thirty-five years they have been acclaimed in the Netherlands and abroad for their virtuosic playing, brilliant arrangements and innovative stage presentation. They are the inventors of a completely new genre: the reed quintet. They provide inspiration to young wind players from all over the world who follow in their footsteps. Calefax can be defined as a classical ensemble with a pop mentality. Calefax takes an adventurous approach to presenting its programs, and has an astonishingly varied repertoire ranging from 1100 to the present day. They perform their own arrangements and newly commissioned compositions for the combination of oboe, clarinet, saxophone, bass clarinet and bassoon. Calefax is open to the influence of world music, jazz and improvisation as a result of countless international tours and collaborations with all kinds of musicians.

Alan R. Kay

Praised by the New York Times for his “spell- binding” performances and “infectious enthusiasm and panache”, Alan R. Kay is Co-Principal Clarinetist and a former Artistic Director of Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and serves as Principal Clarinet with New York’s Riverside Symphony and the Little Orchestra Society. He also performs as principal with the American Symphony and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. Mr. Kay is a founding member of Windscape, and appears regularly with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He teaches at the Manhattan School of Music, The Juilliard School and Stony Brook University. His arrangements for wind quintet are available at Trevco Music Publishing and International Opus.

Michael Nicolas

A “long-admired figure on the New York scene,” (The New Yorker), cellist Michael Nicolas enjoys a diverse career as chamber musician, soloist, recording artist, and improvisor. He is the cellist of the intrepid and genre-defying string quartet Brooklyn Rider, which has drawn praise from classical, world music, and rock critics alike. As a member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), he has worked with countless composers from around the world, premiering and recording dozens of new works. Another group, Third Sound, which Michael helped found, made its debut with an historic residency at the 2015 Havana Contemporary Music Festival, in Cuba. His solo album Transitions is available on the Sono Luminus record label.

Cygnus

With its pairs of plucked strings, bowed strings and woodwinds, Cygnus has a precedent in the Elizabethan “broken consort”. The members — Tara Helen O’Connor, flute; James Austin Smith, oboe; William Anderson and Oren Fader, classical and electric guitars/mandolin/banjo; Calvin Wiersma, violin; Natasha Brofsky, violoncello — are all virtuoso players with a great wealth of experience with some of our most cherished musical institutions, including the New York Philharmonic, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and the Metropolitan Opera Chamber Players.

Cygnus is one of the most intriguing new music ensembles to have emerged in recent years. With its mixed instrumentation Cygnus offers the present day composer a bold new spectrum of colorful combinations to write for. Given the ensemble’s devotion to commissioning new repertoire from a stylistically broad range of composers, combined with the virtuosity with which these pieces are performed, Cygnus presents a consistently exotic and entertaining listening experience.

John Ferrari

Active in classical, jazz, pop, Broadway, film, television, dance music, the avant-garde, and multimedia, John Ferrari appears on dozens of recordings as percussionist and conductor. He is a founding member of the Naumburg Award winning New Millennium Ensemble, a regular guest artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Chamber Music Northwest, and has been a member of Meridian Arts Ensemble since 1993. Mr. Ferrari has also appeared and/or recorded with organizations such as Bang On A Can All-Stars, Da Capo Chamber Players, Manhattan Sinfonietta, Orpheus Chamber Players, Riverside Symphony, Cygnus and many others. He teaches at William Paterson University, the Manhattan School of Music, and the Elisabeth Morrow School.

Collage New Music

Praised by the Boston Musical Intelligencer as “among the finest artists of contemporary (or any other) music,” the musicians of Collage New Music include some of the most outstanding instrumentalists and singers skilled in the musical intricacies, technical virtuosity, and emotional depth that new music requires. The ensemble includes some of the East Coast’s finest musicians, including members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the area’s extraordinary freelance community. Collage’s five decades of compelling music-making have placed it as a leader among adventurous ensembles that nurture the vital intersection of composer, performer, and listener. The ensemble’s repertoire, both wide and deep, reaches from classical twentieth century works, to extraordinary less-known older works, and to marvelous, brand-new creations of American composers. Its diverse programs include solo repertoire, music for larger ensembles, theatrical works, fully-staged chamber operas, and music with extensive electronics.

Windscape

Created in 1994 by five eminent woodwind soloists, Windscape has won a unique place for itself as a vibrant, ever-evolving group of musical individualists, which has delighted audiences throughout North America. Windscape’s innovative programs and accompanying presentations are created to take listeners on a musical and historical world tour, evoking through music and engaging commentary vivid cultural landscapes of different times and places.

As Artists-in-Residence at the Manhattan School of Music, the members of Windscape are master teachers, imparting not only the craft of instrumental virtuosity, but also presenting a distinctive concert series hailed for its creative energy and musical curiosity. The series offers the perfect setting for the ensemble to devise new, sometimes startling programs and to experiment with new arrangements and repertoire combinations.