ORGANIZERS
Martin Brody is Catherine Mills Davis Professor Emeritus at Wellesley College. He served as composer in residence at the American Academy in Rome in 2001-2 and as Andrew Heiskell Arts Director of the Academy from 2007 to 2010. As a composer, he has received grants and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. He has also served as resident composer at the Bogliasco Foundation and La Mortella. He has written extensively about modern music during the Cold War, with special emphasis on the music of Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, and Stefan Wolpe. He is currently President of the Stefan Wolpe Society, Director of One Landscape—an arts and conservation organization—and a trustee of the American Academy in Rome.
Peter Riegelbauer was educated by Georg Hörtnagel in Nuremberg and Rainer Zepperitz in Berlin. Before joining the Berliner Philharmoniker in 1981, Riegelbauer played for three years in the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie and during this time co-founded the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie and the Ensemble Modern. In 1983, he and his Philharmonic colleagues founded the Scharoun Ensemble Berlin. Since joining the Philharmonic, Peter Riegelbauer has played a key role in promoting the orchestra’s self-determination in its committees: from 1969 to 2015, he was a member of the orchestra’s board and the foundation’s board of trustees. From 2015 to 2023, he headed the Karajan Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic.
As both composer and conductor, David Philip Hefti is one of Switzerland’s outstanding musical personalities. He has written over 100 works spanning orchestral, vocal, and chamber music. His artistry has been recognized with major distinctions, including the Composer Prize of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation (2013), the Hindemith Prize of the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival (2015), and the Composer Award of the International Classical Music Awards ICMA (2023). He is also a laureate of the International Composition Competition of the Pablo Casals Festival in Prades, the George Enescu International Competition in Bucharest, and the Gustav Mahler International Competition in Vienna. Hefti’s works have been performed under conductors such as Peter Eötvös, Kent Nagano, Jonathan Nott, Kazuki Yamada, Giancarlo Guerrero, Andris Poga, Mario Venzago, and many others. His chamber music and vocal partners include Juliane Banse, Mojca Erdmann, Benjamin Appl, Antje Weithaas, Baiba Skride, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Lawrence Power, Christian Poltéra, and Jan Vogler. As composer and conductor, Hefti has collaborated with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, the Bavarian State Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, the Ensemble Modern, and the Berlin Baroque Soloists. He has appeared at festivals including Wien Modern, Ultraschall Berlin, the Lucerne Festival, the Dvořák Festival in Prague, Beijing Modern, and the Suntory Festival in Tokyo.
The Boston Globe has described John Aylward’s music as being “delicate and deep, all at once”, and Gramophone has called Aylward’s music “mysterious, iridescent and daring”. The Canadian new music review Textura remarked that Aylward’s recent monodrama Angelus was “gripping music of a high order”, and that, “the manner by which Aylward conjoins his vocal and instrumental elements in the work sometimes calls to mind Berg’s handling of orchestration in Wozzeck and Lulu.”
Aylward’s recent awards and fellowships include those from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress, the Fromm Foundation, MacDowell, Tanglewood, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, First Prize from the International Society for Contemporary Music, and many others. More about John’s music can be found at johnaylward.com.