Richard Edward Wilson

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.[2] Since 1992 he has been composer-in-residence with the American Symphony Orchestra.

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.[3]

Wilson has been praised by 21st Century Music as a "splendidly talented and highly accomplished composer whose music rewards seeking out" [4] 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,"[5] while the New York Times has deemed it "a work of substance and expressivity ... [that] merits a place in the active repertory."

In a review of a recent concert, the New York Times wrote, "Richard Wilson's Diablerie[6] stood apart, contemporary in its vocabulary and grammar but pursuing always the long, lyrical, sometimes operatically expressive lines and Romantic-era concerto writing."[7] A review in Strings Magazine heralded the same composition as "another gem in Wilson's mélange of solo pieces." [8]

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.

• Richard Wilson: Brash Attacks Albany Records TROY 1080
• Richard Wilson: Diablerie Albany Records TROY 773
• Richard Wilson: String Quartets Albany Records TROY 573
• Richard Wilson: Aethelred the Unready Albany Records TROY 512
• Richard Wilson: Affirmations Albany Records TROY 389
• Richard Wilson: Symphony No. 1 Koch International Classics/ Peermusic Classical
• Stresses in the Peaceable Kingdom: The Choral Music of Richard Wilson Albany Records TROY 333
• Richard Wilson: Chamber Music Albany Records TROY 074
• Richard Wilson: String Quartet No. 3, Eclogue, et al. CRI/ New World Records NWCR602
• Richard Wilson: Bassoon Concerto CRI/ New World Records NWCR575
• Richard Wilson: Piano Concerto CRI/ New World Records NWCR618

General

• Official website
• Vassar College-- Richard Wilson, bio
• Peermusic Classical: Richard Wilson Composer's Publisher and Bio
• Discography
• Interview with Richard Wilson, April 22, 1991

Performances of Wilson's works

• Wilson and Genualdi play Wilson's Mixed Signals on YouTube
• Wilson and Genualdi play Wilson's Three Interludes on YouTube
• DECODA performs Wilson's Clarinet Quintet on YouTube
• DECODA performs Wilson's String Quartet No. 2 on YouTube
• Patrick Connolly sings Wilson's Psalm 42 on YouTube
• Blustine, Shao, and Wilson play Figuration on YouTube

Performances of other composers

• Richard Wilson and Joseph Genualdi play Mozart Sonata in F K376 on YouTube
• Wilson and Genualdi play Schubert Rondo in B minor on YouTube
• Wilson, Genualdi, and Shao play Beethoven Trio in E-flat, Opus 70 No. 2 on YouTube
• Richard Wilson and Joseph Genualdi play Brahms Sonata in G on YouTube
• Blanca Uribe and Richard Wilson play Agitations, as arranged by Fitz Patton on YouTube
• Shao and Wilson perform Schumann's Fantasy Pieces on YouTube