![]() But two years later, at the age of twenty-three, Whitacre wrote a work for that other staple of American college campus and community music-making-the symphonic wind band. ‘Writing for chorus is and-I assume-will always be my vocation in the truest sense of the word, a real calling’, he asserts. Since that first choral piece, Go, lovely Rose, at the age of twenty-one, Whitacre’s work has centred around music for voices. ![]() My life was profoundly changed on that day, and I became a choir geek of the highest order.’įrom there the creative impulse took over-dreams of rock stardom morphed into serious compositional study, there was the publication of his first work at the age of twenty-one, and a move to New York’s Juilliard School in 1995 for a Masters with John Corigliano and David Diamond. ![]() And it was extra-curricular interests-not Vegas gambling but women-that sparked a major turning point: ‘I was sort of tricked into joining the choir (there were a lot of cute girls in the soprano section) and on the first day of class we started rehearsing the Kyrie from the Mozart Requiem. To his surprise he was admitted to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, as a Music Education major, despite not being able to read music. His musical upbringing matched the lack of focus and patchiness of most of his contemporaries: piano lessons that ‘didn’t really stick’, as he recalls, because he couldn’t take the practice regime playing the trumpet in junior high marching band for a few years, until he was kicked out for being troublesome playing synthesizers in a teenage techno-pop band with the adolescent dream of being a rock star. Proudly a fifth generation Nevadan, Eric Whitacre was born on the second day of the 1970s in Reno, Nevada-north east of San Francisco, directly north of Yosemite National Park and just east of the American Sierra Nevada ranges. Under Layton’s directorship, Polyphony handles Whitacre’s evocative and soulful music with consummate artistry from the quiet intensity of Sleep to the breathtaking exuberance of With a lily in your hand, by way of the tender innocence of This Marriage (one of three premiere recordings on the disc), this new recording is a stunning showcase both for an up-and-coming young composer and also for the awesome talents of one of the UK’s leading choirs. This is clearly a composer to watch, and if his phenomenal Stateside success is anything to go by, his emergence into the British music scene should be revelatory.Īnd who better to represent an innovative young choral composer than Stephen Layton and Polyphony, award-winning exponents of twentieth-century choral music? Their account of Britten’s Sacred and Profane garnered the group a Gramophone Award and a Diapason d’Or in 2001, in 2002 a Gramophone Award nomination followed for the choir’s Walton CD, and at the 2004 Gramophone Awards Polyphony’s recording of works by Arvo Pärt, Triodion, was voted Best of Category in the Choral division. Whitacre’s published works have sold well over 350,000 copies worldwide. His Water Night (included on this new recording) has become one of the most popular choral works of the last decade, and is one of the top-selling choral publications of all time. ![]() The American Record Guide named his first recording one of the top ten classical albums in 1997, and the Los Angeles Times described his music as having ‘electric, chilling harmonies works of unearthly beauty and imagination’. At the age of only 35, Eric Whitacre has already gained a reputation in the United States that many composers strive for a lifetime to achieve.
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