AARON JAY KERNIS
Aaron Jay Kernis b. 1960, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Aaron Jay Kernis is one of the most honored young American composers. In addition to the 2002 Grawemeyer Award for Colored Field, the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for his String Quartet No. 2 (musica instrumentalis), America’s foremost musical institutions have already commissioned his work: including the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival, and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Each work of Kernis bears the unmistakable stamp of a wildly fertile imagination forged out of the wide-ranging musical languages of the 1980s and 1990s. His work has been inspired by the horrors of the Persian Gulf War (Symphony No.2), the love poems of Anna Swir (Love Scenes), the earthy rhythms of Salsa (100 Greatest Dance Hits), the antics of a child (Before Sleep and Dreams), and the complex craftsmanship of Italian mosaics (Invisible Mosaic III). The Cabrillo Festival has previously performed six Kernis works: two in 1995, New Era Dance (1994) and the chamber work Le quattro stagioni della cucina futurismo (“The Four Seasons of Futurist Cuisine”) (1991), Lament and Prayer (1995) for violin and orchestra in 1999, Color Wheel (2002) in 2004, Air (1995) for cello and orchestra in 2005 and Newly Drawn Sky performed last season at Mission San Juan Bautista. On August 12, 2007 the Festival will present West Coast Premiere of Kernis’ Valentines song cycle (Susan Narucki, soprano).