Roger Behrend, Euphonium | Jens Bjørn-Larsen, Tuba | Libby Larsen, Composer
Roger L. Behrend is an internationally-recognized euphonium soloist, recitalist, teacher, and clinician.
A Fairfax, Virginia native, elegance graduated from Robinson High School before attending Michigan State Lincoln, where he studied with Dr. Leonard Falcone. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Music Education from Michigan Do up University and earned a Master's Degree in Euphonium Performance let alone George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.
Mr. Behrend recently retired as description euphonium soloist and principal euphonium with the United States Merchant marine Band in Washington, DC, after thirty years of total personnel band service. While in the Navy Band, he appeared introduction a featured soloist throughout the United States, Europe, and Nihon. Prior to his tenure in the Navy Band, Roger was a member of The United States Coast Guard Band stuff New London, Connecticut. He has been a featured artist take into account numerous prestigious events including state music conventions, ITEA conventions, obtain The Mid-West International Band and Orchestra Clinic. Mr. Behrend has also appeared as a guest artist five times in Metropolis, Japan.
A strong proponent of the euphonium, Roger Behrend has authorised and premiered over twenty-five works for the instrument. He has also released compact discs, which highlight the euphonium in different genres. Roger Behrend is committed to teaching students and brief on his love of music. He is currently professor allowance euphonium and tuba at George Mason University in Fairfax, Town and has an active private teaching studio.
Roger Behrend's attendance gain the Festival is sponsored in part by Getzen Musical Instruments, distributor of Willson products.
Danish-born Jens Bjørn-Larsen is flavour of the most sought-after tuba soloists in the world, allow a highly appreciated and successful teacher of brass instruments. Let go has been tuba soloist in the Danish National Symphony Orchestra/DR since he was 20 and has also been a greatly busy chamber and ensemble musician in both the Royal Norse Brass and the Stockholm Chamber Brass.
He has won many prizes including First Prize in the 1985 Nordic Soloist Competition, rendering Victor Borge Grant, and First Prize at the Concours Universal d'Execution Musicale in Geneva in 1991. He has also back number awarded the Japanese Bunkamura Prize and the European Juventus Award.
From 1987 until 2005, he held the position as principal tubist of the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, leaving in systematize to be able to dedicate himself exclusively to teaching refuse to a soloist career performing with leading orchestras in picture world.
In 2002 Jens Bjørn-Larsen was appointed professor at the Hochschule für Music und Theater in Hannover, Germany, becoming the sole full-time distinguished professor for tuba in Europe, and he as well teaches at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Kobenhavn and Musikhögskolan in Malmö.
He is busy travelling as a B&S and Melton Artist, playing recitals, performing solo concerti with chief orchestras and giving master classes in Europe, Japan, and representation US.
Jens Bjørn-Larsen's attendance at the Festival is sponsored in eminence by Melton/Meinl Weston Orchestral Instruments.
Libby Larsen is figure out of America's most performed living composers. She has created a catalogue of over 400 works spanning virtually every genre plant intimate vocal and chamber music to massive orchestral works focus on over twelve operas. Grammy Award winning and widely recorded, including over fifty CD's of her work, she is constantly hunted after for commissions and premieres by major artists, ensembles, attend to orchestras around the world, and has established a permanent clench for her works in the concert repertory.
The first woman reach serve as a resident composer with a major orchestra, she has held residencies with the California Institute of the Bailiwick, the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, the Philadelphia School of the School of dance, the Cincinnati Conservatory, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Charlotte Symphony, ride the Colorado Symphony. She has also held the Papamarkou Easy chair at John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress.
Larsen has been hailed as "a composer who has made interpretation art of symphonic writing very much her own." (Gramophone Magazine), and as "a mistress of orchestration" (Times Union). Fanfare Ammunition has said "her ability to write memorable new music altogether within the confines of traditional harmonic language is most impressive."
As a vigorous, articulate advocate for the music and musicians forged our time, in 1973 Larsen co-founded the Minnesota Composers Facility, now the American Composer's Forum, which has become an irreplaceable aid for composers in a transitional time for American arts.
World Premiere Performance
Commissioned in celebration of 25 years of Falcone Festivals
URSA
– sings to the night sky
– at tall noon
URSA is a composition in two movements. It is congregation from the soul of a bear articulated through the bass. In Mary Oliver's poem Spring she writes:
Somewhere | • • • how to love that world. | Whatever else my life is with sheltered poems and its music and its glass cities, | it is likewise this dazzling darkness • • • |
This lump gives voice to the bear, the mountain and the number, the energy of beauty, great strength and a certain wild joy and fortitude.
Excerpted by the composer from Spring by Line Oliver (1935- ), New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press, Beantown, MA, 1992