Richard Edward Wilson


Richard Edward Wilson is an American composer and pianist. Rejecting serialism, to some extent Wilson engages in tonality, though often with the use of considerable chromaticism. His oeuvre includes orchestral, operatic, instrumental, and chamber music among other genres.

Life and career

Wilson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was at a young age drawn to the concerts of George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. His studied piano with Roslyn Raish, Egbert Fischer, and Leonard Shure. He studied cello with Robert Ripley and Ernst Silberstein. In 1963, Wilson graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University, where he studied with Robert Moevs and Randall Thompson. He later received an MA from Rutgers University. From 1966 to 2016, he taught at Vassar College, where he was Mary Conover Mellon Professor of Music. Since 1992 he has been composer-in-residence with the American Symphony Orchestra.

Music

Richard Wilson's compositions are marked by a stringent yet lyrical atonality which often sets him apart from the established schools of modern American music: minimalism, twelve-tone, neo-romanticism, and avant-garde. Two of his works, Eclogue for solo piano, and his String Quartet No. 3, are considered high points of twentieth-century American music. His large-scale orchestral works include the Symphony No. 1, premiered by the Hudson Valley Philharmonic and recorded by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra; Articulations, written for the San Francisco Symphony. Wilson is also the composer of the one-act whimsical opera, Æthelred the Unready, based on the exploits of the ill-advised Saxon king, Æthelred II of England.
He classified the three types of irregular resolutions of dominant seventh chords.

Critical response

Wilson has been praised by 21st Century Music as a "splendidly talented and highly accomplished composer whose music rewards seeking out" and by the New York Sun as "possessed of a hard-won idiom that has grown and developed over the years into a probing blend of wit, classic form, modern harmony, and impressionistic color."
Writing in the New Yorker, Andrew Porter called his String Quartet No. 3 a "richly wrought and unusual composition," while the New York Times has deemed it "a work of substance and expressivity... merits a place in the active repertory."
In a review of a recent concert, the New York Times wrote, "Richard Wilson's Diablerie stood apart, contemporary in its vocabulary and grammar but pursuing always the long, lyrical, sometimes operatically expressive lines and Romantic-era concerto writing." A review in Strings Magazine heralded the same composition as "another gem in Wilson's mélange of solo pieces."

Honors

In 2004 Wilson received an Academy Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, from which he previously received the Walter Hinrichsen Award. Other recent honors include: the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Cleveland Arts Prize; residencies at the Bogliasco Foundation and the Bellagio Center in Italy; and commissions from the Koussevitsky and Fromm Foundations, Chamber Music America, the Chicago Chamber Musicians, the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the San Francisco Symphony.

Works

Source:

Orchestra

Initiation
  • Violin Concerto
  • Bassoon Concerto
  • Symphony No. 1
  • Symphony No. 2
  • Piano Concerto ArticulationsAgitations
  • Triple Concerto PamietamA Child's LondonIntimationsPeregrinationsSilhouette with RevelryFour Love SongsChamisha TehillimThe Cello Has Many Secrets
  • Symphony No. 3Soundcheck
  • ''Bravado''

Works for mixed ensemble

Suite for Five Players
  • Trio for Oboe, Violin and Cello Fantasy and VariationsConcert PieceMusic for Violin and Cello
  • Quartet for Flutes, Bass, and Harpsichord
  • Wind Quintet Serenade: Variations on a Simple MarchDeux pas de TroisFigurationShort NoticeGnomicsCharacter StudiesDithyramb
  • Suite for Winds Line DrawingsContentions
  • Sonata for Viola and Piano AffirmationsThree Interludes for Violin and PianoMotivations
  • Piano Trio Brash AttacksSenza FuroreSpeculation Mixed Signals for Violin and Piano Reed Actions, for clarinet and bassoonAdd Hocket, for percussion ensembleOutswappings, for clarinet quartetNot a Waltz, for flute and pianoThe World As It Is, for flute and pianoDrastic Measures, for mixed ensemble

Works for string quartet

  • String Quartet No. 1
  • String Quartet No. 2
  • String Quartet No. 3
  • String Quartet No. 4
  • String Quartet No. 5
  • String Quartet No. 6

Works for solo piano

Three Short Pieces for PianoEclogueSour FlowersA Child's LondonFixationsIntercalationsMnemonicsCharadesMimesis
  • ''Disclosures''

Works for solo instruments

Music for Solo CelloMusic for Solo FluteProfound UtterancesFlutationsLord Chesterfield to His SonMusic for Solo ViolaIntonationsCivilization and Its DiscontentsTouchstonesIroniesDiablerie OrganicityGravitasLullaby for Sonya, for solo clarinetAethelred's Exit, for solo bass clarinetFour Solitudes for Solo FluteFour Solitudes for Solo English HornFour Solitudes for Solo Violin
  • ''Four Solitudes for Solo Viola''

Works for voice

The Ballad of Longwood GlenA TheoryThree PaintersTribulationsPersuasionsThe Second LawOn the StreetFive Love Songs on Poems by John SkeltonLights on the RiverTransfigured GoatThree Songs on Poems by John AshberyVisits to St. Elizabeth's Three Songs on Poems by Paul KaneI Walked Through the Medieval TownTwo Songs on Poems by Eamon GrennanFour Songs on Poems by John UpdikeWith Lullay, Lullay Like a ChildMiss Foggerty's CakeOn The Death of Juan GelmanObviously Quite Easy, for soprano and bassoonPuer Natus Est, for tenor and organCome, My Celia, for soprano and pianoThree Songs for Friends, for soprano and pianoWords and Music: An Argument, for soprano, baritone, two clarinets and pianoFugue Talking, Walking, Drifting Katya’s Great Romance, for bass, cello and narrator Wait Until Dusk Market Women In the Old School Yard
  • ''Boogie Woogie''

Works for choir

A DissolveCanLight in Spring PoplarsIn Schrafft'sSoakingHome From the RangeElegyHunter's MoonAugust 22Poor Warren
  • ''Fables: Three Poems of Ennis Rees after Aesop''

Opera

  • ''Aethelred the Unready''

Concert band

Eleven Sumner Place
  • ''Jubilation''

Selected discography

  • Albany Records TROY 1080
  • Albany Records TROY 773
  • Albany Records TROY 573
  • Albany Records TROY 512
  • Albany Records TROY 389
  • Koch International Classics/ Peermusic Classical
  • Albany Records TROY 333
  • Albany Records TROY 074
  • CRI/ New World Records NWCR602
  • CRI/ New World Records NWCR575
  • CRI/ New World Records NWCR618