UCSB music professor receives prestigious commission

BY ERIC LINDBERG
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

Ten years ago, UC Santa Barbara music professor and composer Joel Feigin started a piano and chamber orchestra concerto while at the Moscow Conservatory in Russia on a Senior Fulbright Fellowship.
After the success of his first opera and interest in a second, however, the concerto got a little lost in the shuffle. But when his friend and Israeli-American pianist Yael Weiss asked him for a piano concerto, it triggered his memory and he pulled it from the shelf.

“She has always been wanting me to write a piano concerto for her,” Feigin said. “The first time she mentioned it, I thought she was joking.”
After being convinced of her seriousness, Feigin applied for and recently received a $10,000 commission from the Fromm Music Foundation to compose the concerto.
“It’s fairly rare,” he said. “Usually a commission is requested and paid for by the performer.”
The Fromm Foundation, based at Harvard University, provides highly competitive grants for compositions and their performances. Essentially, Feigin said, it’s a pretty big deal.
“It’s a very nice thing,” he said. “Paul Fromm was a very great patron of new music.”
About a third of the way into the 20-minute piece, he said the project is already well underway. He describes it as a tribute and deconstruction of a Mozart piano concerto, a happy, lively piece.
A UCSB faculty member since 1992, Feigin studied with Nadia Boulanger at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France, and with Roger Sessions at the prestigious Julliard School in New York.
In addition to a Fulbright Fellowship, he also received a Guggenheim Fellowship to write his first opera, “Mysteries of Eleusis,” commissioned for Theatre Cornell.
Weiss is an associate professor of music at Indiana University and served as a visiting lecturer at UCSB in 2004 and 2005. An accomplished pianist, she tours worldwide as a founding member of the trio Sequenza, along with violinist Mark Kaplan and cellist Clancy Newman.
In addition to working on the composition, Feigin is also searching for a chamber orchestra to perform the concerto with Weiss.
“It’s very much on its way,” Feigin said. “It’s definitely an exciting project.”