Twice Grammy-nominated composer and performer Derek Bermel studied with Henri Dutilleux, Dutch avantgardist Louis Andriessen, and ragtime revivalist William Bolcom. In his music, seemingly antithetical qualities – classical and vernacular, comic and serious – merge and transform each other unpredictably, their inspiration ranging from theatre (Ritornello), to gestalt psychology (Figure and Ground), to meditations on cosmology (A Short History of the Universe). Thracian Sketches explores and reimagines Bulgarian folk music, while the Violin Etudes distill Bermel’s intellectual creativity into its purest form.
Derek Bermel received a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for his Migration Series (Naxos 8559871). Fanfare wrote: ‘[this] contains works that involve the collision of the classical and non-classical musical worlds, an event that does produce quite a few intriguing musical sparks…this is, then, a disc with something for everyone on it’. His many honours include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, Rome Prize, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships.
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