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Music Academy Of The West
The Music Academy is a classical music training program in Montecito in Santa Barbara County, California. Overview The academy hosts an annual eight-week summer music festival, highlighted by concerts and workshops directed by famous composers, conductors, and artists. The festival hosts 136 pre-professional musicians who receive merit-based full scholarships. Programs of study are vocal piano, voice, collaborative piano, solo piano, and instrumental. History The first impulse to establish a summer music festival in Santa Barbara came from soprano Lotte Lehmann in 1940. In 1947 the Music Academy was founded by Southern California arts patrons, musicians, conductors and composers. In addition to Lotte Lehmann, founders of the academy were conductor Otto Klemperer, violinist Roman Totenberg, harpsichordist Rosalyn Tureck, baritone John Charles Thomas and composers Ernest Bloch, Darius Milhaud, Roy Harris and Arnold Schoenberg, who served as the academy's first composer in ...
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Montecito, California
Montecito (Spanish for "Little mountain") is an unincorporated town and census-designated place in Santa Barbara County, California.McCormack, Don (1999). ''McCormack's Guides Santa Barbara and Ventura 2000''. Mccormacks Guides. p. 58. . Located on the Central Coast of California, Montecito sits between the Santa Ynez Mountains and the Pacific Ocean and had a population of 8,638 in 2020. Montecito is best known as a "celebrity enclave", owing to its concentration of prominent residents. History The site of present-day Montecito, along with the entire south coast of Santa Barbara County, was inhabited for over 10,000 years by the Chumash Indians. The Spanish arrived in the 18th century but left the region largely unsettled while they built the Presidio and Mission Santa Barbara farther west. In the middle of the 19th century, the area was known as a haven for bandits and highway robbers, who hid in the oak groves and canyons, preying on traffic on the coastal route between ...
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Maurice Abravanel
Maurice Abravanel (January 6, 1903 – September 22, 1993) was an American classical music conductor. He is remembered as the conductor of the Utah Symphony Orchestra for over 30 years. Life Abravanel was born in Salonika, Rumelia Eyalet, Ottoman Empire (modern Thessaloniki, Greece). He came from an illustrious Sephardic Jewish family, which was expelled from Spain in 1492 (see Isaac Abrabanel). Abravanel's ancestors settled in Salonika in 1517, and his parents were both born there. In 1909, the Abravanel family moved to Lausanne, Switzerland, where his father, Edouard de Abravanel, was a successful pharmacist. For several years, the Abravanels lived in the same house as Ernest Ansermet, the conductor of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. The young Abravanel played four-hand piano arrangements with Ansermet, began to compose, and met composers such as Darius Milhaud and Igor Stravinsky. He was passionate about music and knew he wanted a career as a musician. He became the pi ...
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Sasha Cooke
Sasha Cooke is an American mezzo-soprano. Cooke was born in Riverside, California, and grew up in College Station, Texas, where her parents are professors of Russian at Texas A&M University. She earned a bachelor's degree from Rice University and trained at the Juilliard School in New York. Cooke attended the Music Academy of the West in 2002. Cooke won best opera recording for ''Doctor Atomic'' at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards, 2011, and again for ''The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs'' at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards, 2018. In 2022, she played Thirza in Houston Grand Opera's staging of ''The Wreckers'' by Ethel Smyth Dame Ethel Mary Smyth (; 22 April 18588 May 1944) was an English composer and a member of the women's suffrage movement. Her compositions include songs, works for piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works and operas. Smyth tended t .... References External linksSasha Cooke at Operabase {{DEFAULTSORT:Cooke, Sasha Living people American mezzo-sop ...
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Grace Bumbry
Grace Melzia Bumbry (born January 4, 1937), an American opera singer, is considered one of the leading mezzo-sopranos of her generation, as well as a major soprano earlier in her career. She is a member of a pioneering generation of African-American opera and classical singers, beginning with Leontyne Price and including Martina Arroyo, Shirley Verrett, Jessye Norman, Kathleen Battle, and Reri Grist), who succeeded Marian Anderson in the worlds of opera and classical music. They paved the way for future generations of African-American opera and concert singers. Bumbry's voice was rich and dynamic, possessing a wide range, and was capable of producing a very distinctive plangent tone. In her prime, she also possessed good agility and bel canto technique (see for example her renditions of the 'Veil Song' from Verdi's '' Don Carlo'' in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as her ''Ernani'' from the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1984). She was particularly noted for her fiery temperament and d ...
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John Brancy
John Brancy (born November 14, 1988) is an American operatic baritone performing with leading opera companies around the world. He is of Polish, German, English and Scottish descent. Early life and education Brancy was born in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, to Margaret and Michael Brancy. He has a younger sister, Jenna, a visual artist Brancy started voice lessons with Marvin Keenze in 2005. He grew up in the Mullica Hill section of Harrison Township, New Jersey and graduated from Clearview Regional High School in 2007.Shyrock, Bob"A Rare Talent" ''South Jersey Life'',August 21, 2007. Accessed October 21, 2018. "Defying considerable odds, John Brancy has posted some rather impressive numbers. For example, in one competition in Miami, the classical baritone from Clearview Regional High School was one of six $10,000 winners.... So it's little wonder the Mullica Hill resident heads to the elite Juilliard School in Manhattan on scholarship in a few weeks to pursue a musical career he ho ...
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Lucine Amara
Lucine Amara (born March 1, 1924) is an American soprano who was chiefly based at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Biography Amara was born Lucine Armaganian in Hartford, Connecticut, of Armenian heritage, before moving to San Francisco where she was raised. She studied at the San Francisco Community Music Center under Stella Eisner-Eyn and sang in the chorus of the San Francisco Opera, 1945–46. In 1946, Amara made her concert debut at the War Memorial Opera House. Continuing her studies at the Music Academy of the West with Richard Bonelli in 1947, she won a contest to appear at the Hollywood Bowl in 1948. She continued as a student at the University of Southern California and as a soloist for the San Francisco Symphony for the following two years. Amara appeared in the title role of ''Ariadne auf Naxos'' and as Lady Billows in Britten's ''Albert Herring'' in 1949. Amara made her Metropolitan Opera debut as the "Voice from Heaven" in Verdi's ''Don Carlos'', the openin ...
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Jerome Lowenthal
Jerome Lowenthal (born February 11, 1932) is an American classical pianist. He has served as chair of the piano department at the Juilliard School in New York. Additionally, Lowenthal is on the faculty at Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California. Lowenthal was born in Philadelphia. He made his debut as a solo pianist at the age of 13 with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Returning to the United States from Jerusalem in 1963, he made his debut with the New York Philharmonic, playing Bartók's Piano Concerto No. 2. Since then, he has performed with famous conductors such as Daniel Barenboim, Seiji Ozawa, Michael Tilson Thomas, Yuri Temirkanov, Leonard Slatkin, Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, Pierre Monteux, Josef Krips, and Leopold Stokowski. He has played sonatas with Itzhak Perlman, piano duos with Ronit Amir, and with Ursula Oppens, as well as quintets with the Lark Quartet, Avalon Quartet, and Shanghai Quartet. His studies included lessons with Eleanor Sokoloff a ...
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University Of California, Santa Barbara
The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the University of California 10-university system. Tracing its roots back to 1891 as an independent teachers' college, UCSB joined the University of California system in 1944, and is the third-oldest undergraduate campus in the system, after UC Berkeley and UCLA. Located on a WWII-era Marine air station, UC Santa Barbara is organized into three undergraduate colleges ( College of Letters and Science, College of Engineering, College of Creative Studies) and two graduate schools ( Gevirtz Graduate School of Education and Bren School of Environmental Science & Management), offering more than 200 degrees and programs. The university has 10 national research centers, including the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Center for Control, ...
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Simon Rattle
Sir Simon Denis Rattle (born 19 January 1955) is a British-German conductor. He rose to international prominence during the 1980s and 1990s, while music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (1980–1998). Rattle was principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic from 2002 to 2018. He has been the music director of the London Symphony Orchestra since September 2017. Among the world's leading conductors, in a 2015 ''Bachtrack'' poll, he was ranked by music critics as one of the world's best living conductors. Rattle is also the patron of Birmingham Schools' Symphony Orchestra, arranged during his tenure with CBSO in mid 1990s. The Youth Orchestra is now under the auspices of charitable business Services for Education. He received the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music in 2001 at the Classic Brit Awards. Biography Early life Simon Rattle was born in Liverpool, the son of Pauline Lila Violet (Greening) and Denis Guttridge Rattle, a lieutenant in ...
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London Symphony Orchestra
The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) is a British symphony orchestra based in London. Founded in 1904, the LSO is the oldest of London's symphony orchestras. The LSO was created by a group of players who left Henry Wood's Queen's Hall Orchestra because of a new rule requiring players to give the orchestra their exclusive services. The LSO itself later introduced a similar rule for its members. From the outset the LSO was organised on co-operative lines, with all players sharing the profits at the end of each season. This practice continued for the orchestra's first four decades. The LSO underwent periods of eclipse in the 1930s and 1950s when it was regarded as inferior in quality to new London orchestras, to which it lost players and bookings: the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1930s and the Philharmonia and Royal Philharmonic after the Second World War. The profit-sharing principle was abandoned in the post-war era as a condition o ...
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Alan Gilbert (conductor)
Alan Gilbert (born February 23, 1967) is an American conductor and violinist. He is principal conductor of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra and music director of Royal Swedish Opera. He was music director of the New York Philharmonic from 2009 to 2017. Early years Gilbert was born in New York City. He is the son of two New York Philharmonic violinists, Michael Gilbert and Yoko Takebe, both now retired from the orchestra. Growing up in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Gilbert attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in Riverdale, where he was a top student. As a youth, he learned the violin, viola, and piano. His sister, Jennifer Gilbert, also studied violin, and became a professional violinist. In the 1980s, Gilbert studied music at Harvard University, where he was music director of the Harvard Bach Society Orchestra in 1988–89. While in Boston, Gilbert also studied with violinist Masuko Ushioda at the New England Conservatory of Music. After obtaining his d ...
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New York Philharmonic
The New York Philharmonic, officially the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York, Inc., globally known as New York Philharmonic Orchestra (NYPO) or New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra, is a symphony orchestra based in New York City. It is one of the leading American orchestras popularly referred to as the " Big Five". The Philharmonic's home is David Geffen Hall, located in New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Founded in 1842, the orchestra is one of the oldest musical institutions in the United States and the oldest of the "Big Five" orchestras. Its record-setting 14,000th concert was given in December 2004. History Founding and first concert, 1842 The New York Philharmonic was founded in 1842 by the American conductor Ureli Corelli Hill, with the aid of the Irish composer William Vincent Wallace. The orchestra was then called the Philharmonic Society of New York. It was the third Philharmonic on American soil since 1799, and had as its intended purpose, ...
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