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biography
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Composer, vocalist, writer, and producer Patrick Castillo
has garnered the esteem of musicians, audiences, and leading arts
figures throughout the classical music community. His accomplishments as
a composer have been recognized by numerous commissions and awards
including the W.K. Rose Fellowship in the Creative Arts. He has also
been the recipient of the Brian M. Israel Prize, awarded by the Society
for New Music for his chamber work Lola.
2008-09 season highlights include the world premieres of The Quality
of Mercy for chamber ensemble and Two Pieces after Grass for
tenor saxophone and electronics, the German premiere of Cirque
for solo violin, and the second New York performance of Patrick
Castillo's chamber cantata This is the hour of lead, presented by
North/South Consonance. In February, Patrick Castillo's arrangements of
Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte were performed by pianist Emanuel Ax,
violinist Itzhak Perlman, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma at Carnegie Hall. Other
recent highlights include the world premiere of Evocation for
chorus and cello by the Manhattan Choral Ensemble and premiere
performances of Patrick Castillo's chamber works by Anti-Social Music,
Forecast Music, the Interlochen Chamber Players, the Society for New
Music, and the Pharos Music Project.
A number of recent commissions have established Patrick Castillo as an
important figure in New York's contemporary vocal music community. The
2005-06 season saw the premiere of Two Songs for Christmas Eve,
commissioned by the Canticum Novum Singers and representing the first
commission awarded in that ensemble's 33-year history. In addition, the
Manhattan Choral Ensemble selected Patrick Castillo as one of three
composers for its 2006 New Music for New York commissioning project. The
resultant work, A Piece of Coffee, met with enthusiastic acclaim
and led to the MCE's commission of Evocation the following season.
Patrick Castillo's choral music has also been performed in recent
seasons by the Cerddorion Vocal Ensemble and the New York Virtuoso
Singers.
In 2005, with composers Martha Sullivan and James Blachly, Patrick
Castillo founded the Pharos Music Project, a collective of composers and
performers dedicated to the presentation of new vocal and chamber music.
Patrick Castillo also serves concurrently as Artistic Administrator for
ArtistLed, classical music's first musician-directed, Internet-based
recording company, and Music@Menlo, a chamber music festival and
institute in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this latter capacity,
Patrick Castillo has authored, narrated, and produced the widely
acclaimed AudioNotes series of CD-listeners' guides to the chamber music
literature. San Francisco Classical Voice has said of this
series: "The quality of these CDs--their sound, commentary, music and
performers--deserve a separate category in the classical Grammy Awards.
AudioNotes engage the concertgoer's senses, brain, and heart, so that
the spirit of music can come through." Patrick Castillo has penned and
produced AudioNotes for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, for
whom he has also given pre-concert lectures.
Patrick Castillo holds a B.A. in music composition and sociology from
Vassar College, where his teachers included Lois V. Vierk, Annea
Lockwood, and Richard Wilson. He has also participated in master classes
with John Harbison, Alvin Lucier, Roger Reynolds, and Charles Wuorinen.
While at Vassar, Patrick Castillo served as composer-in-residence for
the Mahagonny Ensemble, a collective of performers specializing in
twentieth-century music. His Requiem aeternam for mixed chorus
and chamber ensemble, composed for the Mahagonny, was awarded the 2001
Jean Slater Edson Prize. |
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