Search - Diana Hoagland :: Leon Kirchner: Orchestral Works

This disc includes a premiere recording made in 1992 with Leon Kirchner conducting his Music for Orchestra with the orchestra he founded at Harvard along with two historic releases from the SONY Columbia catalog, both featuring Leon Kirchner, as a pianist in his Piano Concerto No. 1 with Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting, recorded 1956 and as a conductor in Lily (for soprano and chamber ensemble), recorded 1973. Leon Kirchner (1919-2009), composer, conductor, and virtuoso pianist, was recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in 2009, and an Honorary Doctorate at Harvard in 2001. He received the New York Music Critics Circle award, the Naumburg Award, Pulitzer Prize, and the Freidheim Award, and commissions from the Ford, Fromm, and Koussevitzky Foundations, the New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Symphony, Spoleto and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festivals, the Boston Symphony, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Kirchner studied with Arnold Schoenberg, Roger Sessions, and Ernest Bloch. He was composer-in-residence and a performer at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the Tanglewood Music Center, Tokyo Music Today (Takemitsu Festival), and the Spoleto, Charleston, Aldeburgh, and Marlboro Music Festivals.