Stephen Feigenbaum | Winner, 6th Annual Commission Competition
Stephen Feigenbaum is a 21-year-old composer from Winchester, Massachusetts. His work draws on aspects of popular music, from the grittiest to the most lyrical. In the summer of 2010, Stephen was the ASCAP Foundation Young Composer Fellow at the Bowdoin International Music Festival in Brunswick, Maine. He also is the 2010 winner of the Sacra/Profana (San Diego) choral composition contest. He is a past winner of an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and of competitions sponsored by the New York Art Ensemble, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra. He also received a fellowship for study at the Norfolk (Connecticut) Chamber Music Festival. His compositions have been performed at Jordan Hall and the Hatch Shell in Boston, the Green Room in San Francisco, Lincoln Center and Le Poisson Rouge in New York, and in cities from Vancouver, to Berlin, to Prague. One of his works was performed by the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, directed by Erich Kunzel, on a CD released by Telarc in 2009. Stephen is a music major at Yale, where he conceived Sic Futuristic (the first production of Sic InC), a high-energy, multimedia show for new chamber music, including his own compositions. He has studied with Kathryn Alexander, Martin Bresnick, Michael Gandolfi, Samuel Adler, and Claude Baker.
Mr. Feigenbaum’s composition, The Mountain Lion, premiered as part of BCE’s Chichester Psalms concert in BCE’s 11th season.
Honorable Mentions
Bryan Christian | Honorable Mention, 5th Annual Commission Competition
Bryan Christian (b. 1984) is an American composer whose works receive frequent performances throughout the United States and Europe. He has received commissions from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, the 59th Festival Les Musicales (2011; Colmar, France), the 19th and 20th Juventus Festivals (2009 and 2010; Cambrai, France), 2011 Monadnock Music in consortium with Duke University, the Ohio Northern University Symphony Orchestra, the Aurora Borealis Duo, pianist Julien Libeer, and famed new music soprano Susan Narucki, among others. He also frequently collaborates with and is commissioned by violinist Liana Gourdjia. Mr. Christian is the recipient of numerous awards, including the J. William Fulbright Fellowship to Estonia, the BMI Student Composer Award, and the Indiana University Dean’s Prize in Music Composition. Mr. Christian is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Music Composition at Duke University. Holding degrees from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University (BM), University of California San Diego (MA), and the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre (MA), Mr. Christian has studied composition with Scott Lindroth, Chinary Ung, Toivo Tulev, Helena Tulve, Sven-David Sandström, Claude Baker, Don Freund, and P.Q. Phan. Additionally, Mr. Christian has received consultations by composers as diverse as Arvo Pärt, George Crumb, Peter Eötvös, and Helmut Lachenmann.
Eduardo Malachevsky | Honorable Mention, 5th Annual Commission Competition
Born in Argentina (1960), Eduardo Andrés Malachevsky is a composer and choral conductor with a unique and fascinating career. After studying flute, conducting and composition, his musical and artistic future seemed promising. However, at the age of 24 he chose to become a Cistercian monk and entered an austere Abbey in the Pampas of Argentina. He lived a contemplative, monastic life for fourteen years. He left the order in 1998 to develop and pursue his creative and conducting talent. As a composer, Mr. Malachevsky’s works have accumulated numerous awards; in effect, 19 times on the last ten years his scores have reached the final stages of national and international composition competitions. With great finesse in his choral writing, his music can be deeply appealing, touching, as well as humorous, burlesque and ironic, exploring all the subtle facets of the human voice. Malachevsky is nowadays the most awarded Argentinean choral composer, developing at the same time a rich career as choral conductor.