Multiple Grammy Award Winner JoAnn Falletta to conduct Three World Premiere Performances

Multiple Grammy Award Winner JoAnn Falletta to conduct Three World Premiere Performances  

by Composers Kenneth Fuchs, Russell Platt, and Wang Jie this Spring with the Buffalo Philharmonic 

 Kenneth Fuchs: Point of Tranquility, March 19-20 

Russell Platt: Symphony in Three Movements (For Clyfford Still), April 23-24 Wang Jie: The Winter that United Us, June 11 

The Buffalo Philharmonic, led by JoAnn Falletta, will perform three world premieres commissioned by the  orchestra this Spring at Kleinhans Hall in Buffalo, New York. Kenneth Fuchs’s Point of Tranquility (Sat.  Mar. 19 & Sun. Mar. 20), inspired by abstract expressionism; Russell Platt’s Symphony in Three  Movements (For Clyfford Still), (Sat. Apr. 23 & Sun. Apr. 24), a musical interpretation of abstract  impressionist works by Still that hang in Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery; and Wang Jie’s The Winter  that United Us (Sat. June 11). The BPO opened the season in September with the world premiere of Daren  Hagen’s Bandanna Overture. 

Falletta, who has garnered international praise as an advocate of new and lesser-known music, has introduced  over five hundred works by American composers, including well over 100 world premieres. (Insert quote from  JoAnn about the importance of commissioning new works, adding to the orchestral repertoire).  

Falletta and composer Kenneth Fuchs have made five highly acclaimed world premiere recordings together,  including the 2019 Grammy Award winning album, Fuchs: Piano Concerto 'Spiritualist'; Poems of Life;  Glacier, Rush. Says Fuchs about the March premiere of his latest work Point of Tranquility, “I am thrilled  about the forthcoming premiere Point of Tranquility with the Buffalo Philharmonic. I composed this work as a  tribute to this superb ensemble of brilliant musicians and in honor of the sustained friendship that JoAnn Falletta  and I have shared in music since our student days together at Juilliard.” 

Russel Platt’s Symphony in Three Movements (For Clyfford Still) is a response to four paintings by the  legendary Abstract Expressionist artist held by Buffalo’s esteemed Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Platt notes that  “When most people hear the name of Buffalo, New York, their thoughts probably wander to a storied football  team and to seasons of formidable winter weather. For me, Buffalo is a city about art and labor - the hundreds of  thousands of hardworking people who have populated and propelled the town over the decades, through thick  and thin, and about the arts that their representatives have woven into its civic culture. My new work, “Symphony  in Three Movements (For Clyfford Still),” will celebrate both the steadfast spirit of Still’s vibrant Abstract  Expressionist paintings and the resilience of the citizens who sustain both the Buffalo Philharmonic and the  Albright-Knox Art Gallery, which has one of the world’s most renowned collections of Still’s work.” 

Wang Jie’s The Winter that United Us will open the BPO’s gala season finale concert on June 11, to be  followed by legendary soprano, Renee Fleming performing Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. Jie’s  work was composed as a gift for Kleinhans Music Hall and the BPO, celebrating the city of Buffalo. The composer,  whose Symphony No 1 was performed by the BPO in 2018, says: “As I compose this new symphony, I keep  returning to the happy memory of 2018, of being in Buffalo with JoAnn, with the BPO’s incredible musicians and  audience. My heart warms as if spring were just around the corner, the much-needed spring in all of our hearts,  as we brave the cutting tragedy of the last two years. I can’t wait to share this symphony with all of you.” 

Multiple Grammy-winning conductor JoAnn Falletta serves as Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, and  Music Director Laureate of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, Principal Guest Conductor of the Brevard Music  Center and Artistic Adviser to the Hawaii Symphony. As Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, Falletta  became the first woman to lead a major America ensemble. This year she was named as one of the fifty great  conductors past and present by Gramophone Magazine. With a discography of almost 120 titles, Falletta is a  leading recording artist for Naxos. She has won two individual Grammy Awards, including the 2021  GRAMMY® Award for Best Choral Performance as conductor of the world premiere Naxos recording, Richard  Danielpour’s “The Passion of Yeshua.” In 2019, she won a Grammy Award as conductor of the London Symphony in the Best Classical Compendium category for Spiritualist by Kenneth Fuchs. Her Naxos recording of John  Corigliano’s Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan received two Grammys in 2008. Her 2020 Naxos  recording of orchestral music of Florent Schmitt with the Buffalo Philharmonic recently received the Diapason  d’Or Award.  

Kenneth Fuchs’s music is performed worldwide and has achieved significant global media exposure through  audio broadcast, downloading and streaming. Fuchs serves as Professor of Composition at the University of  Connecticut. He received his doctor of musical arts degrees in composition from The Juilliard School, where his  teachers included Milton Babbitt, David Diamond and Vincent Persichetti. His music is published by Edward B.  Marks Music Company, Hal Leonard Corporation, Theodore Presser Company, and Yelton Rhodes Music, and it  has been recorded by Albany, Cala, and Naxos Records. 

Russell Platt holds a unique position in American music. As a composer, he is the winner of both the Charles  Ives Scholarship and Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship,  a Copland House Fellowship, a McKnight Fellowship from the American Composers Forum, an ASCAP Young  Composers Award, and several composer residencies at Yaddo. He currently serves on the faculty of the  Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music in Nashville. 

Born in Shanghai, American composer Wang Jie has emerged as one of the most evocative musical voices of  her generation. Her works have been described as “powerfully engaging, richly orchestrated and rhythmically  vibrant.” She came to the United States on a scholarship from Manhattan School of Music where she began her  composition studies as a student of Nils Vigeland and later at the Curtis Institute of Music with Richard  Danielpour. 

More information on Maestro Falletta may be found at www.joannfalletta.com