Fri 8.6 On a Wire

Sat 8.7 Percussion Concerto

JENNIFER HIGDON (b. 1962)

Grammy award-winning composer Jennifer Higdon maintains a full schedule of commissions and her music known for its technical skill and audience appeal. The League of American Orchestras has reported that she is one of America’s most frequently performed composers. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pew Fellowship and two awards from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

Some of her recent commissions include works for the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Indianapolis Symphony, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. One of Higdon’s most recent commissions was a violin concerto for Hilary Hahn which was commissioned by the Indianapolis Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony, and the Curtis Institute Symphony Orchestra, and was recently recorded by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Higdon’s first piano concerto was premiered this season with Yuja Wang, soloist, and the National Symphony Orchestra.

Her works have been recorded on more than two dozen CDs. In Spring of 2003 Telarc released blue cathedral with the Atlanta Symphony on a disc that made the Classical Billboard charts. In 2004 the Atlanta Symphony released the Grammy-winning, Higdon: Concerto for Orchestra/City Scape. The 2009-10 season featured the release of Higdon’s Dooryard Bloom and Short Stories. The 2010-11 season will feature the release of The Singing Rooms on the Telarc label and Higdon’s Violin Concerto on the Deutsche Grammophon label. Her Percussion Concerto was also recorded last season with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Marin Alsop, conducting and Colin Currie, soloist, and garnered Higdon a 2010 Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

Higdon enjoys more than two hundred performances a year of her works. Her orchestral work, blue cathedral, is one of the most performed contemporary orchestral works in the United States, having been performed by more than 200 orchestras since its premiere in 2000. Higdon currently holds the Milton L. Rock Chair in Composition Studies at The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She is delighted to return to the Cabrillo Festival which will feature the West Coast premiere of her On a Wire for eighth blackbird and orchestra, and her Percussion Concerto featuring Colin Currie as the percussion soloist.

Read a recent New York Times article on Jennifer Higdon.

Photo by J.D. Scott