Composer Laura Kaminsky has had her works performed across the U.S. and abroad, including West Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America. She has been a guest composer at Boston Conservatory; Mannes College of Music; Sarah Lawrence College; Wolfson Center for National Affairs at the New School; Vernon Center for International Affairs at NYU; National Academy of Music at Winneba, Ghana; Synthesis International Festival of New Music in Skopje, Macedonia; National Music Academy in Bratislava, Slovakia; and at the Union of Composers and Musicologists at the National Conservatory of Music and the Naregatsi Art Institute in Yerevan, Armenia, among others.

Ms. Kaminsky has received commissions, fellowships, and awards as a composer and presenter, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Aaron Copland Fund, Chamber Music America, CEC ArtsLink International Partnerships, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission, North Carolina Council on the Arts, PONCHO, Jordan Foundation, Jack Straw Productions, Virgil Thomson Foundation, Allen Foundation, King County Arts Commission, Serage Foundation, Meet The Composer, and others, and has held residencies in a number of artist communities. She is a board member of Chamber Music America, a member of the Fellows Council of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and on the Advisory Board of Melodia Women's Choir.

She received her B.A. from Oberlin College, and her master's degree in Music from the City College of New York.

Currently, Kaminsky is Dean of the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College/SUNY, a position she assumed in August 2004. She is concurrently the Curator of Music Programs at New York City's renowned Symphony Space, known nationally for its Selected Shorts program, Wall-to-Wall annual marathon concerts and Bloomsday celebration.

From 1999-2004 she served as Chair of the Department of Music at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, WA. She is also Co-founder and Artistic Director of Musicians Accord, a new music collective based in New York and dedicated to 20th and 21st century chamber music. Musicians Accord has commissioned and/or premiered over 100 new works, has recorded for the Mode, CRI and North/South labels, and has been ensemble-in-residence at the City College of New York since1984.

Prior positions included Vice President for Programs at Meet the Composer, Director of the European Mozart Academy in Poland, an international post-graduate chamber music program; and in New York, Director of Music and Theater Programs at The New School, Artistic Director of The Town Hall, and Associate Director of Education at the 92nd Street Y.

Her music is published by Subito Music Corporation and recorded on the CRI and Mode labels. For more information, go to www.LivingComposersProject.com, www.moderecords.com, and www.subitomusic.com.

A 2001 Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient, she also received two Grammy nominations in January of 2003 for Osvaldo Golijov's recording entitled "Yiddishbbuk". Tara has recorded for Deutsche Gramophon, EMI Classics, Arcadia, CRI, Koch, and Bridge Records. She was the first wind player to be chosen to participate in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Centers Chamber Music Society Two program for emerging artists.

Tara now performs regularly with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Orpheus, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Spoleto USA, Chamber Music Northwest, Music from Angel Fire and the Brandenburg Ensemble. An enthusiastic chamber musician and soloist, Tara has collaborated with such artists as Jaime Laredo, Peter Serkin, David Shifrin, Dawn Upshaw, Ida Kavafian, Ransom Wilson, Paula Robison, Charles Wadsworth, the Orion String Quartet, the Saint Lawrence Quartet, the Tokyo Quartet and the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio. She has been featured on A&E's Breakfast for the Arts and has appeared on a "LIve from Lincoln Center" broadcast.

Tara received a Doctorate from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and she is professor of flute at the Purchase College Conservatory of Music. An avid photographer, she has photo credits in Time Out, Strad, and Chamber Music America magazines.

Since receiving her Doctor of Musical Arts degree, pianist Margaret Kampmeier has performed in hundreds of concerts, presented numerous premieres and recorded extensively. She is a founding member of the Naumburg award-winning New Millennium Ensemble, and performs regularly with the Orchestra of St. Luke's and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Ms. Kampmeier has appeared often with the Kronos Quartet, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Saratoga Chamber Players, Richardson Chamber Players, Peter Schickele and many new music ensembles including Sequitur, Newband, Speculum Musicae and Musician's Accord. A dedicated educator, Ms. Kampmeier teaches at Princeton University and has presented forums on the music of women composers and contemporary techniques. She holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she studied with Gilbert Kalish.

Rise, my love, my beautiful one.
The winter is past and the rains have gone
and flowers cover the world
and the time for our singing has come.

Tobias Picker (b. New York City, 1954), described by BBC Music Magazine as "displaying a distinctively soulful style that is one of the glories of the current musical scene," began composing at the age of eight. He studied at the Manhattan School of Music, The Juilliard School and Princeton University. He began to receive important commissions and prestigious awards while still in his late teens and quickly became established as one of America's most sought after young composers.

By the age of thirty, Picker was the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Bearns Prize (Columbia University), a Charles Ives Scholarship, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. In 1992, he received the prestigious Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. From 1985-90, Picker was the first Composer-in-Residence of the Houston Symphony. He has also served as Composer-in-Residence for major international festivals including the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and the Pacific Music Festival.

Mr. Picker has received commissions and performances from Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Lorin Maazel and the Pittsburgh Symphony, Edo de Waart and the San Francisco Symphony, Christoph Eschenbach and the Houston Sympony, The Cleveland Orchestra, The Chicago Symphony, David Zinman and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Pinchas Zukerman and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the BBC Proms, David Robertson and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, James Levine and the Munich Philharmonic, the Helsinki Philharmonic, the Zurich Tonhalle, Jan Latham-Konig and the Strasbourg Philharmonic, the Jerusalem Symphony, the Pacific Music Festival, the Kuhmo International Music Festival, Peter Serkin, Emmanuel Ax, Ursula Oppens, Paul Watkins, Young Uck Kim, Barbara Hendricks, as well as other leading orchestras, ensembles and soloists throughout the world. His catalogue consists of works in all genres including three symphonies, four operas, three piano concertos, concerti for violin,viola, cello and oboe, songs, and chamber music.

The Encantadas, composed in 1983, has been performed internationally in seven languages. Sir John Gielgud recorded it for Virgin Classics in 1989. Many important actors have performed the narration and Mr. Picker himself has performed it often. Numerous performances of The Encantadas in the 2003 season marked its twentieth anniversary as a classic of the modern symphonic repertory.

In 1996, the Santa Fe Opera gave the world premiere of Mr. Picker's first opera, Emmeline. The opera played to sold-out houses, standing ovations and international critical acclaim, and was nationally telecast on PBS's Great Performances. Emmeline's premiere at New York City Opera was hailed by The New York Times as one of the ten most significant musical events of 1998.

Since that time Picker has become recognized as one of America's foremost composers of opera. His fourth opera, An American Tragedy, based on the novel of the same name by Theodore Dreiser (later adapted for film as "A Place in the Sun"), was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, and premiered at the Met in the fall of 2005. The chamber version of his opera Th‚rŠse Raquin had its world premiere in March of 2006 in London, at the Linbury Studio of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden; it is scheduled for a New York premiere by the Dicapo Opera Theatre in February of 2007.

Tobias Picker's music is widely recorded. Most recently, Chandos Records released a disc including his Cello Concerto, Keys to the City, and And Suddenly It's Evening, as well as the premiere recording of his third opera, Thérèse Raquin. His music has also been recorded by Sony Classical, Virgin Classics, Nonesuch, Ondine, and First Edition, among others.

Caroline Stinson, a native of Edmonton, Canada, performs as a recitalist and as a member of CELLO, the Athabasca String Trio, the Contrasts Quartet and the new music and improvisation ensemble Open End, which she founded with her husband and composer Andrew Waggoner. She holds a BM from the Cleveland Institute of Music and a Performance Diploma with Distinction from the Hochschule für Musik, Köln, Germany, where she performed, toured and was awarded first prize in the Hohnen Foundation Cello Competition in 2000. From 2000-2003, she joined the Cassatt String Quartet, performing across North America, commissioning and premiering some two dozen new works. Caroline has worked closely with composers Peter Eötvös, John Harbison, George Rochberg, Anna Weesner, Aaron Jay Kernis on the premiere recording of his Ballade for cello and piano and his Trio in Red with the Contrasts Quartet, Steven Stucky on the premiere recording of his string quartet, and with pianist/composer Joan Tower performing her works at Maverick Concerts in Woodstock. Ms. Stinson is building programs for solo cello, the first of which she presented at the 2006 Winnipeg New Music Festival in Canada. She has recorded for Albany, Bridge, Koch, and Naxos Records, and is on faculty at Syracuse University and is a Concert Artist and Kean Univeristy in New Jersey.

Margaret Kampmeier, piano

Since receiving her Doctor of Musical Arts degree, pianist Margaret Kampmeier has performed in hundreds of concerts, presented numerous premieres and recorded extensively. She is a founding member of the Naumburg award-winning New Millennium Ensemble, and performs regularly with the Orchestra of St. Luke's and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Ms. Kampmeier has appeared often with the Kronos Quartet, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Saratoga Chamber Players, Richardson Chamber Players, Peter Schickele and many new music ensembles including Sequitur, Newband, Speculum Musicae and Musician's Accord. A dedicated educator, Ms. Kampmeier teaches at Princeton University and has presented forums on the music of women composers and contemporary techniques. She holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she studied with Gilbert Kalish.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Four Etudes for Ursula, for solo piano, was commissioned by Northwestern University for Ursula Oppens. The piece is dedicated to Ms. Oppens, who premiered the work on February 4, 1997 at Carnige Hall. Ms. Oppens has performed the piece in various venues around the world, including Seji Ozawa Hall, Theatre Champs Elysee, and The Aldeburgh Festival as well as at the Konzerthaus Berlin and festivals throughout Europe.

Dove Aria from Thérèse Raquin. Place, the setting of a poem by W. S. Merwin, was the final movement of a large work for Soprano, Flute and Orchestra called The Rain in the Trees. I later stripped away the words to this song and wove the music into the Dove Aria for Thérèse Raquin on a libretto by Gene Scheer. The Dallas Opera premiered this opera in 2001.

The white dove sat in the corner of the ark
For forty days and forty nights.
Her tiny feathers trembling in the dark,
Her small head buried in terror and fright.
When at last the sun came out
And cast its light upon the boat,
The dove took wing and all could see
Her disappearing, pearly coat.
And so we all must search for home,
Seek out our respite and our love,
And soothe the terrors of the darkest night,
Just as the gentle, faithful dove.
Who will take me to firm land?
Who can lead me to a place of rest?
Who can soothe my sorrow?
When will the sun come out and cast its light on me?
What can end my sorrow?
Where is my faithful dove?

Soprano Judith Bettina has appeared as guest soloist with such orchestras as the Houston Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the American Composers' Orchestra, and the Munich Philharmonic. She has performed with chamber groups throughout the United States and Europe, including guest appearances with the Bach Chamber Soloists, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, The Met Chamber Ensemble, Bard Music Festival, Collage New Music, New York Philomusica, Parnassus, Speculum Musicae, The Geneva Music Festival, Ensemble 21, Boston Musica Viva, Parnassus, San Francisco Contemporary Chamber Players, the Monadnock Music Festival, the International Viola d'amore Congress, and invitational concerts at the Library of Congress. Ms. Bettina became an admirer and champion of Tobias Picker's music upon first hearing his piano quintet Nova. At her suggestion he set the Goethe poem "Aussöhnung" for his first song, which he later used in an expanded version for his Symphony No. 2. Ms. Bettina performed the premier of this work with the Houston Symphony, and again with the Munich Philharmonic. She has performed Mr. Picker's Rain and the Trees for voice, flute and orchestra with poems of W. S. Merwin, and his Tres Sonetos de amor for voice and piano, settings of poetry by Pablo Neruda. Highly acclaimed for her performances of contemporary music, Ms. Bettina has also had works written for her by Milton Babbitt, Mel Powell, Christopher Berg, Chester Biscardi, David Rakowski, and Richard Karpen. In addition, she has premiered many works including compositions by Charles Wuorinen, GeorgeTsontakis, Richard Danielpour and Vivian Fine. Next season Ms. Bettina will be performing Milton Babbitt's Head of the Bed with the Met Chamber Ensemble with James Levine. Bridge Records has recently released a recording of works written for both Ms. Bettina and her husband, pianist James Goldsworthy that also features songs of Tobias Picker, including "not even the rain", which is on this evening's program.

James Goldsworthy has performed in Europe, Israel, Japan, Canada, and the United States, including broadcasts on Austrian National Television, the California cable television show Grand Piano, Vermont Public Television, BBC radio, and Minnesota Public Radio. While a Fulbright scholar in Vienna, Goldsworthy participated in German Lieder master classes with Hans Hotter and studied vocal coaching and accompanying with Erik Werba, Walter Moore, and Roman Ortner. He performed in one of the Musikverein 175th anniversary celebration concerts given in the Brahms Saal, and concertized in Vienna, Baden, and Spital am Semmering, Austria. More recently, he performed at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, and at the White House. He has appeared in chamber music concerts including celebrations of Milton Babbitt at The Juilliard School, Carnegie Recital Hall, and Cooper Union, James Levine's Met Chamber Ensemble, and in the Works & Process series at the Guggenheim Museum. He has premiered works by Milton Babbitt, Christopher Berg, Chester Biscardi, David Olan, Tobias Picker, Mel Powell, David Rakowski, Cheng Yong Wang, and Amnon Wolman. Goldsworthy is currently the Director of the New Works for Young Pianists Commissioning Project. He has taught at Goshen College, Stanford University, and the University of St. Thomas, and is presently on the piano faculty at Westminster Choir College of Rider University. His recordings with Judith Bettina are on CRI and Bridge Records labels.

In 1986, the state of Texas was engaged in a celebration of its sesquicentennary. This event was to be marked by the commissioning of a series of concert openers for the Houston Symphony, of which I had just been appointed composer in residence. Old and Lost Rivers took its place in what came to be known as the Fanfare Project. I composed the piece in Houston, as a tribute to my new home. Later that year, I made a piano version of the piece for Ursula Oppens and presented it to her as a birthday present.

Ken Noda is Musical Assistant to James Levine on the Artistic Administration of the Metropolitan Opera. He studied with Daniel Barenboim and performed as soloist with such orchestras as the Berlin, Vienna and New York Philharmonics; the London, Boston and National Symphonies; Orchestre de Paris, and Philharmonia Orchestra of London, under such conductors as Barenboim, Chailly, Levine, Mehta, and Previn. He has collaborated with Maestro Levine (at two pianos) and Itzhak Perlman; and as accompanist to such singers as Kathleen Battle, Kurt Moll, Jessye Norman, Dawn Upshaw, and Deborah Voigt. He devotes much of his time to the training of young singers in the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at the Met.

Susan Martin Maffei is an internationally known tapestry artist whose background includes art studies at The Art Students League in NYC, tapestry training at Les Gobelins in Paris, and apprenticeship and studio work at the Scheuer Tapestry Studio, NYC. She has been weaving her work professionally since 1985. She has taught and exhibited in the U.S. and abroad and has work in both public and private collections.

Archie Brennan has been a professional tapestry maker since 1948. Her served a 7 year apprenticeship, he is an arts graduate and has since been a recipient of a number of British and international awards. He has worked collaboratively with many artists of international standing. His won work is in public and private collections in many countries. He has lectured, taught and exhibited throughout the world.