Program Biography

DEREK BERMEL composer, clarinetist, conductor

The versatile DEREK BERMEL -- clarinetist, composer, and jazz and rock musician-- has been widely hailed for his creativity and theatricality as a composer and his virtuosity as a performer. He has been featured at numerous international music festivals, and his commissions have included those from the National, Saint Louis, Albany, and New Jersey Symphonies, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Fabermusic Millennium Series, American Composers Orchestra, WNYC Radio, De Ereprijs (Netherlands), Birmingham Royal Ballet, Westchester Philharmonic, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, New York International Fringe Festival, and cellist Fred Sherry. He has also received many of today’s most important awards, including the Rome Prize, Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, and residencies at the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, Tanglewood, Banff, and Yaddo. As clarinetist, he has appeared throughout the U.S. and Europe, including recitals in New York, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Detroit, Jerusalem, The Hague, and Paris, and radio broadcasts on both sides of the Atlantic. He has premiered dozens of new works, including his clarinet concerto, "Voices," which created a sensation when it was premiered at Carnegie Hall and performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, and Boston Modern Orchestra Project. He looks forward to his first opera, a music-theater collaboration with librettist Wendy S. Walters. His first recording, a disc of his chamber music, was released last season. Derek Bermel is the founding clarinetist of Music from Copland House and co-founder, music director, and co-artistic director of the Dutch-American interdisciplinary ensemble TONK