"There are no two points so distant from one another that they cannot be connected by a single straight line -- and an infinite number of curves."
Composer Lawrence Dillon has produced an extensive body of work, from brief solo pieces to a full-length opera. Three disks of his music are due out in 2010 on the Bridge, Albany and Naxos labels. In the past year, he has had commissions from the Emerson String Quartet, the Cassatt String Quartet, the Mansfield Symphony, the Boise Philharmonic, the Salt Lake City Symphony, the Ravinia Festival, the Daedalus String Quartet, the Kenan Institute for the Arts, the University of Utah and the Idyllwild Symphony Orchestra.
Although he lost 50% of his hearing in a childhood illness, Dillon began composing as soon as he started piano lessons at the age of seven. In 1985, he became the youngest composer to earn a doctorate at The Juilliard School, and was shortly thereafter appointed to the Juilliard faculty. Dillon is now Composer in Residence at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where he has served as Music Director of the Contemporary Ensemble, Assistant Dean of Performance, and Interim Dean of the School of Music. He was the Featured American Composer in the February 2006 issue of Chamber Music magazine.
The Prism Saxophone Quartet is preparing an upcoming concert of quartets for baritone sax – that’s right, all four players playing the big uncle of the family. Problem: bari saxes require their own plane tickets, so how do the musicians, who live in four different places, afford to get together to rehearse? Answer: they all came here, where we have four baris – two owned by Taimur Sullivan, our sax teacher, and two lent by our students. Prism snuck in here for three days, so our kids got to listen in on rehearsals of one of the more adventurous and successful ensembles in the biz.
And it only took three plane tickets to get them together.
On another note, the Emerson Quartet residency last week was a great success. Two very intense concerts – the encore for the first concert was the fourth of Webern’s Five Pieces – to a packed house, with rock-star lines afterwards for getting CDs autographed.
