Sospeso's series American Voices is designed to spotlight alternative musical voices in our country. For the first installment, Sospeso presents an evening of music and performance art by
Gheorghe
Costinescu.
The distinctive music of Romanian-American composer Gheorghe Costinescu blends music with theatre and live performance in an unique synthesis of media. He was born in
Bucharest in 1934 and has resided in New York since 1969. Active as a composer, conductor, pianist, musicologist, and educator, he received a PhD with distinction from Columbia University, where he studied with Chou Wen-chung. He also did post graduate work at the Juilliard School, where his main teacher was
Luciano Berio, and he earned an MA in composition from the Bucharest Conservatory, under Mihail Jora. He also studied with Nadia Boulanger at
Fontainebleau and attended the new music
courses at Darmstadt and Cologne, where he worked with Stockhausen and Henri
Pousseur.
Premieres of his works have taken place at Lincoln
Center and at the festivals of Royan, Shiraz-Persepolis and Tanglewood.
His work for the stage
The Musical Seminar was chosen by the national jury of the League ISCM as an official American submission to the ISCM World Music Days; the German version of the work,
Tatort Musik, was produced by the State Opera of Stuttgart in 1989, and the British premiere took place in 1992 at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow.
Among the grants and awards he has received are from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a Fulbright Scholar Award.
This concert marks the first full-length retrospective of Costinescu's music in New York.
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