'Marcus Thompson making his Ritz Chamber Players Debut!' at Finale Concert Wednesday, 7:30 PM, June 8, 2011

[Marcus Thompson]

It is a very special guest who makes his debut with the Ritz Chamber Players at the group's Season Finale on Wednesday, June 8. A staggering 17 CDs grace the Recordings page of his website. They include 2 orchestral discs conducted by the legendary Paul Freeman. Among his chamber music discs are 2 with the Seattle Chamber Music Society, 4 with the Amsterdam Chamber Music Society and 5 with the Boston Chamber Music Society.

Marcus Thompson Bio
"Marcus Thompson is a distinguished performer both on viola and viola d'amore. A multi-faceted artist, he is equally esteemed as recitalist, orchestral soloist, chamber musician, recording artist and educator.

"Born in New York's South Bronx, he began violin studies at the age of six in a private studio, and at fourteen attended The Juilliard School Pre-College where he studied with Louise Behrend. After completing seven years of viola and viola d'amore studies with Walter Trampler, he received his Bachelors and Master's degrees, and Juilliard's first doctorate in viola performance."

RitzChamberPlayers.org

Jacoby Symphony Hall

Finale Concert June 8, 2011

Times-Union Center

for the Performing Arts

Jacksonville, Florida

7:30 PM

Bruch 8 Pieces for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano, Op. 83

Piazzolla “History of the Tango”

Beethoven String Trio in C Minor, Op. 9, No. 3

Brahms Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25

Terrance Patterson - Clarinet

Kelly Hall-Tompkins - Violin

Marcus Thompson - Viola

Tahira Whittington - Cello

Terrence Wilson - Piano

Ann Hobson Pilot - Harp

James Lee III: 'The work that Dr. Thompson will premiere is my sonata for viola and piano that he commissioned'

[James Lee III (b. 1975)]

Yesterday AfriClassical posted: “National Gallery of Art: Marcus Thompson & Judith Gordon in Music of Bach, Schumann, James Lee III & Enescu Feb. 13.” Prof. Lee promptly responded with a new photograph and an updated bio. Here is his explanation of the new work:

“The work that Dr. Thompson will premiere is my sonata for viola and piano that he commissioned me to compose for this particular concert on February 13 at the National Gallery of Art. The sonata is in three movements and the first movement is loosely based off of the book of Revelation chapter 13 in sonata-form. The second movement is a passionate and reflective look at the character of the mixed multitude that John saw standing on the sea of glass in Revelation 7 and 15. The last movement is a rondo.

Thank you.

James Lee III

JAMES LEE III Biography

James Lee III, born 1975 in St. Joseph, Michigan cites as his major composition teachers Michael Daugherty, William Bolcom, Bright Sheng, Betsy Jolas, Susan Botti, Erik Santos and James Aikman. As a composition fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center in the summer of 2002, he added Osvaldo Golijov, Michael Gandolfi, Steven Mackey and Kaija Saariaho to his roster of teachers, and studied conducting with Stefan Asbury. Recent premieres and performances of his music include; Papa Lapa by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Thomas Wilkins conducting, in 2001; the premiere of Sympathy, for flute, percussion, harp and chorus, given by the Leigh Morris Chorale in St. Paul in 2002; A Place for God's People, an orchestral work premiered at Andrews University.

In 2002 Dr. Lee had two premieres at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts. Those premieres include The Appointed Time for string quartet and Psalm 61 for members of the Boston Symphony Chorus. Through the Eyes of Time for orchestra was commissioned by the Alabama All-State Festival Orchestra and introduced in Mobile under Anthony Elliott in 2004. Recently Maestro Leonard Slatkin has begun to champion Dr. Lee’s work. In 2006 he premiered Beyond Rivers of Vision in Washington D.C. at the Kennedy Center. During his inaugural concerts as the new music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Mr. Slatkin premiered A Different Soldier’s Tale with the orchestra in Detroit on December 11 – 14, 2008. The National Symphony, Baltimore/Soulful Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, Memphis Symphony, and the Southwest Michigan Symphony Orchestra have performed James Lee III’s orchestral works. Leonard Slatkin and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra performed Beyond Rivers of Vision on January 29 – 30, 2010.

The 2009-2010 season has included world premieres of 12 Preludes of the New Earth for piano by Daniel Lau (November), A Clean Heart for mixed chorus by the Baltimore Choral Arts Society (December), Scenes Upon Eternity’s Edge for flute, violin, cello, and piano by the Monument Piano Trio and flute (February), and a Morgan Fanfare by the Morgan State University Band with Melvin Miles directing (April). During the 2009 - 2010 season Dr. Lee has won the Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond Award of $10,000 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City. He was also the composer-in-residence for the Ritz Chamber Players, an African-American chamber music society based in Jacksonville, Florida. Performances with that organization included the Florida premiere of The Appointed Time for string quartet. Pianist Terrence Wilson also performed Dr. Lee’s sonata for piano in Seattle, Washington on April, 29, 2010.

In May 2010, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performed a movement from Beyond Rivers of Vision. James Lee III has been commissioned by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra to compose a work about the life of Harriet Tubman to be premiered in September 2011. He has also been named the winner of the Sphinx Consortium Commission in which Mr. Lee will compose a new work that will be premiered by about eight to nine orchestras during the 2011-2012 season. Mr. Michael Tilson Thomas will give the actual premiere of the new work with the New World Symphony Orchestra in Miami, FL in October 2011. Dr. James Lee III is also an associate professor of composition and theory at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Marcus Thompson: William Grant Still Music in Winter Festival of Boston Chamber Music Society Jan. 9, 16 & 23

[Marcus Thompson]

The Boston Globe
Classical Notes
Time binds the music and MIT
By David Weininger
Globe Correspondent / January 8, 2010

“January, you might say, is a time for time. The new year is still new, and there’s space in which to reckon the days just gone and those to come. Time’s limits, and its limitless possibilities, are both in our minds, each vying for primacy. With its first Winter Festival, the Boston Chamber Music Society is providing a soundtrack for this reflective period. Beginning tomorrow and continuing through the next two Saturdays, the festival has as its theme time and its relation to music, with each concert preceded by a forum exploring one aspect of this giant, multifaceted issue. Unusually for BCMS, the concerts will be heavy on modern music; the conferences will be interdisciplinary, with contributions also from science, poetry, and design.

“The gathering is the brainchild of Marcus Thompson, who is in his first year as artistic director of the society and his 36th on the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the concerts and conferences are taking place. He says the idea arose from a desire on the part of both institutions to open themselves to new audiences. 'It just seemed to me that I was hearing the same thing from two different sides of the world that I occupy,’ says Thompson by phone. 'The need to do something different, something that would appeal to a new, younger audience. And also, the need to do something that gave a clear explanation of what we were doing and why we were doing it.’

“The festival is being funded partially by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts specifically to support the performance of American music; Libby Larsen, George Crumb, William Grant Still, and Peter Child are among the composers represented - with Mozart, Beethoven, and Dvorak. 'In structuring the program, I have to remember that we are the Boston Chamber Music Society,’ Thompson says candidly, alluding to the ensemble’s penchant for rather conservative programming. 'We can’t suddenly disavow who we are; we have to play the things that we play well.’

“Because of the volume of unfamiliar repertoire, he thought that a unifying idea would be helpful. 'When people are faced with a tremendous amount of anything new, sometimes it’s best to just focus on one thing that helps you to get in: one metric, one avenue that allows you to make connections.’ More broadly, the festival represents a sort of collective effort to think through music’s unique means of marking out, organizing, and manipulating time, its horizons of memory and anticipation. Or, as Thompson puts it, 'Music is really audible time. It can’t be experienced in an instant; it has to be unfolded in time.'’’ [William Grant Still (1895-1978) is profiled at AfriClassical.com]

Myrtle Hart Society On MIT Professor of Music 'Marcus Thompson, viola and viola d'amore'

Myrtle Hart Society

Rashida N. Black, Founder/Executive Director

December 2008 eNewsletter

Marcus Thompson, viola and viola d'amore

South Bronx, New York native, Marcus Thompson is a distinguished performer both on viola and viola d'amore. A multi-faceted artist, he is equally esteemed as recitalist, orchestral soloist, chamber musician, recording artist and educator. He was recently announced as the new Artistic Director of the Boston Chamber Music Society, which has since its inception in 1982, been led by cellist Ronald Thomas '74. In addition to his busy performing career, Mr. Thompson serves on the Board of Project STEP, is a member of Chamber Music America and the American String Teachers Association. He is also a member of the Viola d'Amore Society and of the American Viola Society. Mr. Thompson served as host director for the 1985 American Viola Society Congress XIII held at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. On his website, you can listen to two excerpts from Rameau's Troisieme Concert, performed at the Harvard Musical Association, with Peter Sykes, Harpsichord, Marcus Thompson, Viola d'Amore, and Laura Jeppesen, Viola da Gamba. Recording courtesy of Lee Eiseman.

B.M., M.S., D.M.A., The Juilliard School. Violin studies with Louise Behrend. Viola with Walter Trampler. Additional studies with Abraham Skernick, Michael Avsharian, and Ivan Galamian. Chamber music studies with the Juilliard, Amadeus, and Netherlands string quartets and Joseph Gingold. Recordings on Vox/Turnabout, Centaur, and with the Boston Chamber Music Society on Northeastern. Former faculty of the Juilliard School Pre-College Division, Oakwood College, Wesleyan University, Mount Holyoke College. Currently Robert R. Taylor Professor of Music and a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT, where he is director of performance and chamber music studies.