North/South Consonance, Inc. will open its 2008 spring concert season with a special event on Sunday, April 20 at 3 PM featuring The North/South Chamber Orchestra performing compositions by composers born in Europe and the Americas.
The program will be held at the auditorium of Christ & St. Stephen’s Church (120 West 69th St) in Manhattan. Admission is free. It is part of the 5th Annual Immigrant Heritage Week sponsored by the Mayor’s Office.
The concert will open with the premiere of a work especially written for the occasion by Tudor Dominik Maican, a 19 year old composer born in Germany to Romanian parents. Mr. Maican grew up in the Washington DC area where he began studying music with his mother Valerica before enrolling in the preparatory division of The Juilliard School. President George W. Bush honored him as a 2007 Presidential Scholar. In 2006 he was named composer-in-residence at Dumbarton Oaks and also won a fellowship from the Davidson Institute for Talent Development. Maican has also won many prizes including the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award; the Tchaikovsky Conservatory Young Composers Competition in Russia; and the George Enescu Romania International Competition. Maican’s new work Vox Maris (Voices from the Sea) is a one movement quasi-impressionistic composition that attempts to evoke the sounds of the sea at the shore before the sunset.
Another work also being heard for the first time is Remembrances by Howard Quilling, the California composer born in 1935. A student of the late Ingolf Dahl, Mr. Quilling served as composer-in-residence at Bakersfield College from 1971 until his retirement in 1996. He is now in charge of the New Directions Concert Series sponsored by the Bakersfield Symphony. Cast in three contrasting movements the music of Remembrances brings to mind both serious and playful memories eventually subsiding in the quietness of forgetfulness.
The Puerto Rican composer Rafael Aponte-Ledée will be on hand to celebrate his 70th birthday by listening to the premiere of his recently completed Aforismos (Aphorisms). Born in Guayama, Puerto Rico in 1938, Mr. Aponte-Ledée studied in Madrid and Buenos Aires with Cristobal Halffter and Alberto Ginastera. From 1968 until 2003 he taught at the Puerto Rican Conservatory in San Juan. He has also served as director of the Latin American Foundation for Contemporary Music. Aforismos is in two concise, contrasting movements. Its music juxtaposes unusual timbres with rhythmic elements derived from Caribbean music.
Long time New York resident Richard Owen will be feted on the occasion of his 85th birthday. His wife, soprano Lynn Owen will be the soloist in a performance of Patterns, Owen’s stirring setting of a poem by Amy Lowell. Owen is a graduate of both the Manhattan School of Music and Harvard Law. His operas have enjoyed critical acclaim in the US, and Europe. Soprano Lynn Owen has appeared on the stages of the Metropolitan Opera House, Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall. She has also toured throughout the US, Europe, Canada and Latin America. Her recent compact disc release From Vienna to Broadway with Love was nominated for a Grammy award.
The program will conclude with a recent work by Max Lifchitz, the Mexican-born composer and conductor who founded North/South Consonance, Inc. in 1980. A New York City resident since 1966, Mr. Lifchitz studied at Juilliard and Harvard and has taught at Columbia University, the Manhattan School of Music, New School University, Columbus State University and the University at Albany, SUNY. A tireless advocate of today’s composers, Lifchitz has recorded more than 40 critically acclaimed albums. His Yellow Ribbons No. 42 (2006). belongs to a series of compositions being written as homage to the former American hostages in Iran.
The composers will be on hand to introduce their works and meet with the audience during intermission and after the concert. All participants in the event are available to the press for interviews and may be contacted through our office at (212) 663-7566 or by e-mail at
North/South Consonance’s 2007-08 season is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. For further information about its activities, including concerts and recordings, please visit http://www.northsouthmusic.org/
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