Platt's brief, lovely work ["Now That We've Come to the End"] starts with gauzy high notes in the strings opening into seductively forbidding lines for the clarinet and piccolo. All the instruments finally achieve an ominous consonance, with a dark, subtle undercurrent in the double bass.
bio
Russell Platt holds a unique position in American music. As a composer he is the winner of both the Charles Ives Scholarship and Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2007 Copland House Fellowship; as a writer, he has been honored with a 2010 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Music Criticism, in recognition of his work for The New Yorker, where he is a music senior editor, and for Opera News, to which he is a regular contributor.
Platt’s music is consistently performed by exceptional musicians, including the New York Festival of Song, Bargemusic, the Knights, the St. Petersburg and Tessera String Quartets, the Dale Warland Singers, the Metropolitan Opera tenor Paul Appleby, I Virtuosi Italiani Orchestra of Verona, the Verdehr Trio, Colin and Eric Jacobsen of the string quartet Brooklyn Rider, the bassoonist Peter Kolkay, the violinists Frank Almond and Livia Sohn, the pianists Brian Zeger and Margo Garrett, and the conductor Alexander Platt with the Wisconsin Philharmonic. He has received commissions from Bargemusic, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra Ensembles, the American Composers Forum, the Mirror Visions Ensemble, and the Chamber Music Society of Minnesota; his work has also been performed at the Aspen, Ravinia, and Grand Teton festivals. He has been awarded six composing residencies at Yaddo, in addition to residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His music can be heard on the Albany and Innova labels.
An alumnus of Oberlin College, the Curtis Institute of Music, the University of Minnesota (Ph.D. 1995), and St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, Platt’s principal teachers were Ned Rorem, Dominick Argento, Alexander Goehr, Robin Holloway, Judith Lang Zaimont, and Edward J. Miller. In April of 2012 he curated a “NYFOS Next” concert of contemporary works by himself and others for the prestigious New York Festival of Song. Recent commissions include works for Switzerland’s Orchestre Symphonique Bienne (a piece which will be given its U.S. premiere in April 2014 by JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra), a new work for the Mirror Visions Ensemble (to be premiered at the American University in Paris in the same month), and for the Five Borough Songbook.