Get the royal treatment in the Queen City: March 16-20, 2002

American Music Teacher, Dec, 2001

Conference Events (Information subject to change)

Conference Artists

William Bolcom and Joan Morris

Pianist and composer William Bolcom and Joan Morris, mezzo-soprano, have been concertizing together as husband and wife since 1972. This duo performs an eclectic mixture of music: American popular songs from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s and `30s, the latest songs by Leiber and Stoller, and cabaret songs by Bolcom and poet-lyricist Arnold Weinstein.

They have performed throughout the Unites States, Canada and abroad. Recent appearances for Bolcom and Morris include the Alice Tully Hall/Lincoln Center, the Grace Rainey Rodgers Hall/Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Jordan Hall in Boston. In May they entertained the Justices of the United States Supreme Court.

To date, Bolcom and Morris have recorded twenty-two albums. After the Ball--A Treasury of Turn-of-the-Century Popular Songs garnered a GRAMMY nomination for Morris for "best overall vocal soloist performance on a classical album."

Morris attended Gonzaga University in Spokane prior to her scholarship studies at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. She has appeared in off-Broadway and road productions and with harpist Jam Miller at the Cafe Carlyle, the Waldorf-Astoria's Peacock Alley and other Manhattan night spots. Since 1981, Morris has taught cabaret class at the University of Michigan's School of Music, where she is an adjunct professor of musical theater.

Bolcom entered the University of Washington at age 11, studying composition with John Verrall and piano with Berthe Poncy Jacobson and earning a bachelor of arts degree. He then attended Mills College in California and the Conservatoire de Musique in Paris, completing his doctorate in composition at Stanford University.

Bolcom has earned numerous awards for his compositions, including the 2e Prix from the Paris Conservatoire, a BMI award, two Guggenheim fellowships, several Rockefeller Foundation awards, the Pulitzer Prize for music, the March Blitzstein Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters and many others.

Bolcom has taught composition at the University of Michigan since 1973, where he has been a full professor since 1983 and chairman of the Composition Department since 1988. He was named the Ross Finney Distinguished University Professor of Music by the University in 1994.

In addition to their rigorous performance schedule, Bolcom and Morris frequently give master classes throughout the Unites States and Canada in the "classical American popular song."

The Eroica Trio

The GRAMMY-nominated Eroica Trio is one of the first all-female chamber ensembles to reach the top echelons of their field. Pianist Erika Nickrenz, violinist Adela Pena and cellist Sara Sant'Ambrogia have been electrifying the concert stage with their combination of technical virtuosity, vivid artistic interpretation and contagious exuberance in performance for more than a decade. The Trio won the prestigious 1991 Naumburg Award, resulting in an acclaimed Lincoln Center Debut and has since toured the United States, Europe, and Asia. While maintaining this demanding concert schedule, the trio has released three celebrated recordings for Angel/EMI Classics Records.

The trio took its name from Beethoven's passionate Third Symphony. Italian for "heroic," it is a word that aptly reflects the ensemble's approach to their art. Eroica's members are prolific commissioners with at least one world premiere every season. This season, they will premiere a work commissioned for them by the Raleigh Chamber Music Guild by composer Scott Warner, entitled "Blessings to the Goddess."

The women who make up the Eroica Trio are all top-ranked, award-winning soloists who have performed on many of the world's great stages. Erika Nickrenz, who made her concerto debut at New York's Town Hall at age 11, was a featured soloist on the PBS series "Live from Lincoln Center," and has enjoyed a solo career that has taken her across America and Canada, and to Italy, Switzerland and Australia. Adela Pena garnered first prize at the Washington International competition and has toured extensively as a soloist in the United States, Europe and South America. She has appeared with the English Chamber Orchestra, in recital at Carnegie Hall and on live European television, broadcast from Paris. Sara Sant'Ambrogio's international successes include a 1986 bronze medal at the prestigious International Tchaikovsky Cello Competition in Moscow, resulting in concert tours across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Canada, and her performance in the 1991 GRAMMY award-winning recording of Leonard Bernstein's Arias and Barcaroles.

Christopher Taylor

Pianist Christopher Taylor was the recipient of a two-year fellowship awarded by the American Pianists Association in its distinguished Classical Fellowship Awards. Taylor reached the finals of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 1993, receiving the Bronze Medal, and in 1996, he received an Avery Fisher Career Grant. A winner of one of the first Gilmore Young Artists Awards, Taylor also took first prize in the William Kapell International Piano Competition.