From the return of Brian Ferneyhough to Charles Wuorinen's honorary doctorate, this year's June in Buffalo has been one of the hottest on Prof. Feldman's permanent record.
And for this Sunday's finale of June in Buffalo 2013, the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music is pulling out the Pulitzer stop.
At 2:30 p.m. in Slee Hall, alongside works by JiB faculty, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra will perform Yehudi Wyner's Chiavi in Mano--the composer's Pulitzer Prize-winning piano concerto from 2006. Long-time June in Buffalo pianist Geoffrey Burleson joins JoAnn Falletta's BPO as the soloist.
The New York Times recently described Burleson's playing as "vibrant" and "compelling," praising further his "appropriate sense of spontaneity." Some six hours away on the opposite end of New York State, Classicalite can pretty much guarantee the same accolades for Burleson in Buffalo.
As for Yehudi Wyner's music, we've excerpted just a small portion from his Milken Archive biography that's particularly relevant to what you'll hear Sunday at Slee:
"For nearly a half century, Yehudi Wyner has been recognized as one of America's most gifted composers. Although born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, he grew up in New York City. His father, Lazar Weiner (1897-1982), was a leading exponent of Yiddish high musical culture, both as a choral conductor and as a composer, and is now the acknowledged avatar of the Yiddish art song medium. Throughout his youth, Wyner was exposed to his parents' Yiddishist intellectual milieu, and their home was frequented by literati and artists from the Yiddish cultural orbit. (His father had the spelling of his children's surname changed--though not his own--to preclude a common mispronunciation.)
By the age of four or five, no doubt inspired by the music he heard in that environment, Wyner began improvising short pieces that had an eastern European folk or Hassidic character. He started his formal musical life as a pianist, although he never studied with his father--who was himself a brilliant pianist. While a piano student of Loni Epstein at The Juilliard School, Wyner became increasingly attracted to composition, which he then studied at Yale with Richard Donovan and Paul Hindemith, and at Harvard with Randall Thompson and Walter Piston. After completing his undergraduate work, he spent a summer in residence at the Brandeis Arts Institute in Santa Susana, California, a division of the Brandeis Camp, where the music director was Max Helfman, one of the seminal figures in Jewish music in America. That program brought together college-age students as well as established Jewish--and especially Israeli--composers, in an effort to broaden the Jewish artistic horizons of young musicians. There, Wyner came into contact with some of the most creative and accomplished Israeli composers and other artists of that period, and he was introduced to new artistic possibilities inherent in modern Jewish cultural consciousness."
Here's Wyner, himself, performing his Three Short Fantasies from February of this year.
If it's longer audio that you want, however, head on over to HuffPo for a 55-minute interview with Yehudi Wyner and Christopher Lyon. It's well worth your time, indeed.
