Commissioned Composer: Don Freund
Edward Auer has long been recognized as a leading interpreter of the works of Chopin. As the first American to win a prize in the prestigious International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, he has returned to Poland for well over 20 concert tours, playing in every major city and with every major orchestra.
Auer has played solo recitals and concertos in over 30 countries on five continents, collaborating with such conductors as Zubin Mehta, Charles Dutoit, Herbert Blomstedt, Sergiu Comissiona and Riccardo Chailly.
Auer grew up in Los Angeles, where he studied piano with Aube Tzerko, a protégé of Artur Schnabel, and composition with Leonard Stein, a Schoenberg student. A precocious chamber musician and the son of an accomplished amateur violist, he was playing the Mozart piano quartets and the Schumann quintet with his father and his friends at the ripe old age of eight. He won several competitions in the Los Angeles area, and frequently appeared in concerts there, both as soloist and in chamber music.
Auer’s studies continued at the Juilliard School with Rosina Lhévinne and in Paris on a Fulbright Grant under Julius Katchen. Besides the Chopin Competition, Auer was a prizewinner in the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, the Beethoven competition in Vienna and the Queen Elisabeth in Brussels, and took First Prize in the Concours Marguerite Long in Paris. Now, years later, these and other contests regularly invite him to be on their juries.
For two years now, Mr. Auer has been at work on an ambitious series of recordings of the works of Chopin, to celebrate that composer’s 2010 bicentennial. As currently projected it will consist of at least eight volumes. The first, Chopin Nocturnes Volume 1, was released to great acclaim and a dazzling review from New York Concert Review’s Harris Goldsmith. Edward Auer is on the Piano faculty at Indiana University Bloomington.
Reid Alexander, Professor of Music (piano and piano pedagogy) at the University of Illinois, is an accomplished pianist and nationally one of the most widely published. A finalist in the first Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, his early piano study was with the Arthur Loesser student, Gerald Snyder, and later the nationally known Schnabel student, Stanley Fletcher. Additional coaching has occurred with Jack Radunsky, Ruth Slenczynska, Kenneth Drake, and Mieczyslaw Horszowski. Credits include recitals and/or presentations in over 40 states and abroad. Recent presentations include the Music Teachers National Association, National Conference and many of its state and local affiliates, the National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy, as well as international engagements in both the Republic of China and Canada. A doctoral graduate of Vanderbilt University, a wide range of his publications are available from Frederick Harris Music (Toronto) and Stipes Publishing (U.S.). The past few years has seen the release of the widely used Keyboard Musicianship series, volumes 1-II, 9th edition and the highly anticipated inaugural volumes of the Celebrate Composer Series, approximately 2,600 pages of solo piano music in 27 volumes including extensive Notes for Study and Performance.
In 1991, the University of Illinois honored Professor Alexander as a faculty recipient of an all-campus award for teaching excellence, recognizing his teaching versatility with pianists of all ages. Each year he works with a stellar class of both international and domestic pianists on the Urbana campus. His students have received numerous honors as demonstration teachers and or performers for the National Conference on Piano Pedagogy and the Music Teachers National Association. Former students hold prestigious teaching positions in the U.S. and abroad with the most recent including high profile tenure track appointments at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Kennesaw State University, and National Taiwan University. During the 1999-2000 academic year, Dr. Alexander served as tenured Professor of Piano and Director of Piano Pedagogy at The University of Oklahoma-Norman. Past leadership contributions include completed terms as president of both the Illinois State Music Teachers Association and the East Central Division of Music Teachers National Association.
Don Freund has composed over 100 performed works, ranging from solo, chamber, and orchestral music to pieces involving live performance with electronic instruments, music for dance and large theatre works; he is also active as a pianist, conductor, and lecturer. He has received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2005), two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (Cello Concerto; Passion with Tropes), commissions including the Tennessee Arts Commission with Opera Memphis (Opera: The Bishop's Ghost), and prizes including the Washington International String Quartet Composition Competition, the International Society for Contemporary Music/League of Composers International Piano Music Competition, the 1995 AGO/ECS Publishing Award in Choral Composition (God's Grandeur), the 1997 Rodrigo Riera International Competition for Guitar Composition (Stirrings), the Hanson Prize, the McCurdy Award, the Aspen Prize, 25 ASCAP Awards, and a Macgeorge Fellowship from the University of Melbourne, Australia. His works are published by MMB Music, Boosey and Hawkes, ECS, Seesaw, and Vivace Press.
Don Freund is Professor of Composition at the Indiana University School of Music since 1992. In 1998 he was composer-in-residence at the Australian National Academy of Music, and lectured on his music at Royal Conservatories in Brussels and the Hague, the Royal Academy of Music in London, the Prague Conservatory and the Hochschule in Vienna. Teaching composition continues to be a major component of Freund's career; students from 30 years of teaching have won an impressive array of awards and recognitions.
Don Freund was born in Pittsburgh in 1947; he studied at Duquesne University (BM `69), and earned his graduate degrees at the Eastman School of Music (MM'70, DMA'72). His composition teachers were Joseph Willcox Jenkins, Darius Milhaud, Charles Jones, Wayne Barlow, Warren Benson, and Samuel Adler. From 1972 to 1992 he was chairman of the Composition Department at Memphis State University. As founder and coordinator of Memphis State University's Annual New Music Festival, he programmed close to a thousand new American works; he has been conductor or pianist in the performance of some two hundred new pieces, usually in collaboration with the composer.
Recent performances of Freund’s music include Radical Light by the Kansas City Symphony, Sinfonietta by the IU Concert Orchestra and the Interlochen World Youth Symphony Orchestra, End of Summer (orchestral winds) at the Aspen Music Festival, Departing Flights (piano trio) premiered by Composers, Inc. in San Francisco, Hard Cells for 14 instruments by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Feux d’artifice-Tombeau (solo piano) and Departing Flights at Merkin Hall (ISCM/League series), Soft Cells (15 instruments) and Quilt Horizon by New Music Ensembles at Indiana University and University of Southern California, Life of the Party (Concerto for Bassoon and 16 friends) at the Melbourne International Double Reed Conference, and Sky Scrapings (alto saxophone and piano) in Prague and Montreal. His hour-long ballet Madame Bovary was premiered at Indiana University in March, 1996. Recent CD releases include Madame Bovary Ballet Suite, Soft Cells, Viola Concerto, Dissolving Music (Indiana University Orchestas and New Music Ensemble, IUSOM-10 distributed by Albany), Triomusic (Verdehr Trio on Crystal), Jug Blues & Fat Pickin' (Cincinnati CCM Wind Ensemble on Klavier), Pentecost and Hard Cells (Indiana New Music Ensemble), Radical Light (Bowling Green Philharmonia on Albany), Rough and Tumble (Pastiche Ensemble on ACF-Innova) and Backyard Songs (Jubal Trio on CRI). As a pianist, Freund's recital repertoire has extended back from new music to several complete performances of Bach's WTC Book I and his own pianistic realizations of Machaut. (see Reviews) He has performed Earthdance Concerto with wind ensembles at Florida State University, West Virginia University, and Bowling Green State University