Composer Scott Wheeler Among 2010 Classical Recording Foundation Award Winners
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Composer Scott Wheeler is among the just-announced winners of the 2010 Classical Recording Foundation Awards. A total of four prizes will be presented at the foundation’s ninth annual awards ceremony and benefit on October 4, 2010, at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall.
Wheeler, the CRF Composer of the Year, will be honored for a recent Naxos recording of his songs featuring singers Susanna Phillips, Krista River, Joseph Kaiser, and William Sharp with pianist Donald Berman, to be released later this year. Of the recording, producer Adam Abeshouse said, “Scott has come up with a fresh approach to American art song by going back to the basics – clearly set, communicative poetry with appealingly direct vocal lines and smart, idiomatic accompaniments. You can tell that he studied with American vocal-music master Virgil Thomson. You can also tell that he has spent many years performing the American musical theater repertoire. His songs have quite an expressive range, but all of them speak clearly.”
In addition, recipients of the Samuel Sanders Collaborative Artists Award Maria Bachmann and Jon Klibonoff are being honored for their fifth album together, Heart of Glass, which includes Philip Glass’s Sonata and will be released later this year on his Orange Mountain Music label. The duo gave the world premiere of the piece in 2009. It was commissioned for them as a birthday gift from patron Martin Murray to his wife, Lucy Miller Murray, founder of the Market Square Concert Series in Harrisburg, PA. Meet The Composer in New York coordinated the commission.
The two winners of the CRF Young Artist Award—pianists Natasha Paremski and Orion Weiss—will also be honored.
(—condensed from the press release)