Faculty Recital: Kenneth Radnofsky, Saxophone: "A Question of Identity"

Artist(s)

Kenneth Radnofsky has appeared as soloist with leading orchestras including the Leipzig Gewandhaus, New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur, Jerusalem Symphony with Gisele Ben-Dor and Boston Pops with John Williams. Radnofsky premiered Gunther Schuller’s Concerto with the Pittsburgh Symphony (composer conducting), and David Amram's Concerto with the Portland Symphony, under Bruce Hangen. The 100 plus solo works he has commissioned also include Netzer, Trester, Colgrass,  Harbison,  Martino,  Gandolfi, Olivero, Horvit, Fatas, Yannatos, Perker, Jakoulov, Schwartz, Yang and Bell, to name a few. He teaches world-wide and helped establish saxophone programs in Taiwan with Shyen Lee, and in Venezuela with Claudio Dioguardi.  He is Professor of Saxophone and Chamber Music at New England Conservatory, Lecturer at Boston University and Director of the BU Tanglewood Institute Summer Saxophone Workshop, Past President (2014-24) and current Board member of the Boston Woodwind Society, and founder of World-Wide Concurrent Premieres and Commissioning Fund. He is a founding board member of Gunther Schuller Society with John Heiss and Charles Peltz, co-founded the Amram Ensemble, and is a Selmer Artist.  He studied with Joseph Allard, Jeffrey Lerner, David Salge and Duncan Hale.

Praised as “compelling” and “thought-provoking” by the Boston Musical Intelligencer, Francine Trester’s A Walk In Her Shoes was premiered by Boston Landmarks Orchestra at the Hatch Memorial Shell. Most recently, Trester’s In Her Element was premiered at Sanders Theater by the Kendall Square Orchestra.

Trester’s libretto and score to the chamber opera Florence Comes Home, about composer Florence Price, was commissioned by Shelter Music Boston and described by the Intelligencer as “meaningful…wide and comprehensive.” Trester was commissioned by Kenneth Radnofsky to write Street Views for the Amram Ensemble. World-Wide Concurrent Premieres commissioned Trester’s Reminiscence: 3 Meditations on Friendship, which was also premiered by Radnofsky.

Trester is a Professor of Composition at Berklee College of Music and a 2023 Berklee Faculty Fellowship recipient. Trester earned her undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Yale, where she studied composition with Jacob Druckman and Martin Bresnick and violin with Syoko Aki. Trester’s music is recorded on Affetto/Naxos, Albany, Crystal and Stone Records labels and is available through the American Composers Alliance.

www.francinetrester.com

From Francine Trester:  I am very excited for our upcoming work - for voice, violin, sax and piano - which will celebrate women through a setting of the powerful "Eshet Hayil" poem, a text which speaks to 5000 years of strong, feminist tradition within Judaism. Also to be set for this project - "Shir lama'alot" and "Ya Ribon Olam," ancient texts with meaningful, contemporary resonance: "Shir lama'alot" is a Psalm (King David), written when the Jewish people were in horrific pain, beseeching help from G-d; King David fought in Gaza.  "Ya Ribon Olam" was written by Yisrael Nagarah in Aramaic, a poet from Gaza. A text composed in 1628, it is a poem sung up to this day, by both Ashkenazim and Sephardim, by Jews both in Israel and of the diaspora.

David Amram began his professional life in 1951 as a French hornist in the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington DC. After serving in the US Army, he moved to New York City in 1955 and played French horn in the jazz bands of Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, and Oscar Pettiford. In 1957, he created and performed in the first ever jazz + poetry readings in New York City with novelist Jack Kerouac, a close friend with whom he collaborated artistically for over 12 years. Since the early 1950s, David has traveled extensively, working as a musician and a conductor in over 35 countries and criss-crossing the United States and Canada.

His many film scores include those for Pull My Daisy (1959), Splendor in the Grass (1960) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962). He composed the scores for Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park from 1956 to 1967, and premiered his comic opera Twelfth Night with Papp’s libretto in 1968. From 1964 to 1966, he was the Composer and Music Director for the Lincoln Center Theatre and wrote the scores for Arthur Miller´s plays After the Fall (1964) and Incident at Vichy (1966).

Appointed by Leonard Bernstein as the first Composer in Residence for the New York Philharmonic in 1966, David is now one of the most performed and influential composers of our time. The New York Chamber Music Festival chose him as Composer in Residence for its 2016-17 season. His most popular recent symphonic compositions include This Land, Symphonic Variations on A Song By Woody Guthrie (2007), commissioned by the Guthrie Foundation; Three Songs, A Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (2009); Greenwich Village Portraits for Alto Saxophone and String Orchestra (2018); and Partners: A Double Concerto for Violin, Cello and Orchestra (2018). 

He has collaborated as a composer with Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, Eugene Ormandy, Sir James Galway, Langston Hughes and Jacques D´Amboise, and as a musician with Thelonious Monk, Johnny Depp, Hunter S. Thompson, Dizzy Gillespie, Odetta, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Betty Carter, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Paquito D´Rivera, Tito Puente and Jerry Jeff Walker.

In addition to eight honorary doctorates, the most recent from New England Conservatory in 2022, David has earned several New York City honors, among them the Harold Clurman Spirit Award “for courageous contribution to the culture of New York City and beyond” (2014). In 2017, he was made a Lifetime Member of the Actors Studio, received the first annual Lifetime Achievement Award from Folk Music International, and a special award by Farm Aid for 30 years of annual musical collaborations with Willie Nelson and his band to help support America´s family farmers through music. 

The subject of the prize-winning full-length feature documentary, David Amram: The First Eighty Years, he is the author of three memoirs. A fourth book, Amram@90: Notes from a Promising Young Composer, was published in November of 2022, celebrating his 92nd birthday.             

Sonia Sanchez is an American poet, writer, and professor. She was a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement and has written over a dozen books of poetry, as well as short stories, critical essays, plays, and children's books. In the 1960s, Sanchez released poems in periodicals targeted towards African-American audiences, and published her debut collection, Homecoming, in 1969. In 1993, she received Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and in 2001 was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for her contributions to the canon of American poetry. She has been influential to other African-American poets, including Krista Franklin.  Sanchez is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective. In 2018, she won the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for proven mastery in the art of poetry. At the 84th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards ceremony on September 26, 2019, Sanchez was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Cleveland Foundation. In October 2021, Sanchez was awarded the 28th annual Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize "in recognition of her ongoing achievements in inspiring change through the power of the word." In 2022, Sanchez was awarded The Edward MacDowell Medal by The MacDowell Colony for outstanding contributions to American culture. - excerpt from Wikipedia

Adira Amram is a multidisciplinary performer based in NYC. She is a comedian, singer/songwriter, dancer, choreographer, narrator and writer. She is most often seen performing with her award winning comedic dance music group Adira Amram & The Experience. She is frequent collaborator of scratch DJ virtuoso Kid Koala and has toured internationally with him since 2009, currently they are collaborating on puppet mockumentary. She is the co-host of "Ophira&Adira: A Variety Show" with comedian, writer and actress, Ophira Eisenberg and wrote and performed the theme song for Eisenberg’s Webby Award winning podcast "Parenting is a Joke".  Other career highlights include performances at Just For Laughs Montréal and Toronto, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Greene Space at WNYC and The New Museum. 

Mezzo-soprano and contemporary vocalist Carrie Cheron is celebrated internationally for having “the voice of an angel.” She is a regular soloist with and member of Emmanuel Music, Skylark Vocal Ensemble, Boston Baroque, Lorelei Ensemble, and folk/baroque collective Floyds Row and is a featured soloist on all three of Skylark’s Grammy-nominated recordings. Recent and upcoming solo performances include Vivaldi's Gloria, Stabat Mater, and Juditha Triumphans, Bach's St. Matthew Passion, St. John Passion, B Minor Mass, Christmas Oratorio, countless Bach cantatas with Emmanuel Music; Reena Esmail’s This Love Between Us, Caroline Shaw’s The Listeners, multiple premieres by Francine Trester, and more. She has performed with Boston Landmarks Orchestra, Monadnock Music Festival, Portland Bach Experience, and this spring she performed as a soloist with Emmanuel Music at BachFest Leipzig. In December, she will perform as a soloist alongside Tony Award-winning actress Christine Baranski and Skylark Ensemble in a performance of Benedict Sheehan’s musical interpretation of A Christmas Carol at The Morgan Library in New York City. As a performing singer/songwriter, Ms. Cheron has been celebrated by the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, Great Waters Folk Festival, and Rocky Mountain Folks Fest. She has shared the stage with such artists as Sweet Honey In The Rock and Anaïs Mitchell. A dedicated educator, Carrie is an Associate Professor of Voice at Berklee College of Music. She is a proud alumna of New England Conservatory where she studied with Carole Haber. For more information, please visit www.carriecheron.com.

Ziang Yin ('23 NEC, '19 Juilliard), is a current master's student at NEC studying with Bruce Brubaker. Ziang has received highly professional piano education from a young age, including instruction from pianists such as Chu-Fang Huang, Gary Graffman, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, Robert McDonald, Victor Rosenbaum, and Bruce Brubaker. Ziang has won several prestigious competitions, including both the Tennessee International Music Festival (with full scholarship) and the Canadian Music International Festival where he performed the Rachmaninov Second Piano Concerto with the Canadian Orchestra.  On his musical journey, Ziang has performed with top maestros around the world and has held recitals in many countries, including a recital at Lincoln Center after winning the Metropolitan International Piano Competition as its youngest winner. Ziang not only performs as a soloist but also collaborates with many other musicians. He enjoys exploring the connections and effects between different instruments, as well as the exchange of ideas with different musicians.