In Wednesday’s (6/11) Star Tribune (Minneapolis), Graydon Royce reports that Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts “has signed a three-year contract as director of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, which has its next session in January. The Institute is a professional composer training program that was developed in the 1995-96 season. It now includes tutorials, rehearsals and seminars for emerging composers and a public performance of their work. That concert is scheduled for Jan. 16, with music director Osmo Vänskä conducting.… [Composers] chosen for the 2013 Composer Institute, which was canceled due to the labor dispute, have been offered participation in the 2015 program. Puts takes over from Aaron Jay Kernis, who founded and directed the Institute before he resigned last October to protest the inability of the Orchestra to reach a labor accord.… Puts called the Institute one of the only comprehensive programs of its kind. ‘It provides aspiring orchestral composers the exceedingly rare opportunity to hear their works performed by one of the world’s great orchestras,’ he said in a statement.” Royce notes that Puts’s Symphony No. 4, “From Mission San Juan,” will be performed this coming weekend by the Minnesota Orchestra under the direction of Courtney Lewis.
Posted June 12, 2014
Photo of Kevin Puts by Andrew Shapter
