Chester Biscardi
 |
|
Chester Biscardi |
|
Catalog: works for opera, chorus, voice and piano, orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo piano; incidental music for theater, dance and television. Publishers: C. F. Peters; Merion Music of Theodore Presser Company; member, BMI. Recordings: CRI; Intim Musik (Sweden); New Albion; New Ariel; North/South. Awards: Rome Prize; Guggenheim Fellowship; Ives Scholarship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; Aaron Copland Award; Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship; Djerassi Foundation Fellowship; Japan Foundation Fellowship; MacDowell Colony Fellowships; Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Fellowship. Grants: Fromm Music Foundation; Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation; Meet the Composer; National Endowment for the Arts; New York Foundation for the Arts. Selected works - piano: Major biographical listings: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians; The New Grove Dictionary of Music in the United States For further information: http://home.att.net/~cbiscardi/ |
Yamaha artist Chester Biscardi took a detour from his music studies at the age of 16. His parents wanted Biscardi, who started composing at age nine, to be a lawyer, and a prominent musician suggested that he take his parents’ advice. So he studied Italian instead, becoming fluent in the language, and earning first a B.A. in English literature and then an M.A. in Italian Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Fortunately for music, Biscardi, returned to his first love, but with enhanced sensitivity to the rhythm and meaning of words. “The background in literature has been really important to my work,” says the 53-year old composer, who went on to earn an M.M. in Musical Composition from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Yale School of Music. “It has fed into my sense of structure and sensitivity to language.”
A native of Kenosha, Wisconsin, Biscardi now lives in New York City, and is Director of the Music Program at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where he holds the William Schuman Chair in Music. He is a winner of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, an honor he shares with an elite group of American composers including Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, and Elliott Carter.
His lyrical, accessible music, with its attention to nuance and color, includes works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and solo piano, but his foray into chamber opera and his recent concentration on songs reflect his years as a scholar of text. “The Gift of Life,” a song cycle for soprano and piano (1990-93), is based on the writings of Emily Dickinson, Denise Levertov, and Thornton Wilder. “Modern Love Songs,” for voice and piano with words by William Zinsser and “Recovering,” for tenor and piano with words by Muriel Rukeyser, are among his most recently completed works.
Biscardi’s newest project is an opera for which he is writing both libretto and music. He will be working on it this summer during a six-week stay as composer-in-residence at Copland House, Aaron Copland’s restored home and studio in suburban New York.
Biscardi, having recently purchased a new Disklavier®, is eagerly exploring the possibilities his new instrument provides for his work. “The piano combines technical wizardry with the really beautiful, warm, and sensuous sound that I require,” says Biscardi.
For the reader unfamiliar with Biscardi’s works, he suggests his "Piano Sonata" of 1986, which he revised in 1987, as a good sampling of his work. The ten-minute, single-movement piece, based on a painting and lithograph of Jasper Johns, is divided into three sections reflecting three musical textures: angular and pulsating; fast runs and chords; and lyrical. It was written for Yamaha artist Anthony de Mare, who recorded it in 1988 for CRI, and it is published by C. F. Peters.
The pianist/critic, David Burge, described it as “a festive, fanfare-like sound piece, making effective use of well-spaced major triads colored with added notes and wide-spread, resonant sonorities composed primarily of stacks of perfect fourths and fifths. Whatever the work’s genesis, it is difficult to imagine a more positive, optimistic musical statement. This is truly a sonata - a sounded piece - in the original sense of the word.”
