Class Notes 1950s Composer H. Leslie Adams ’55 was honored with a $10,000 Life Achievement Award from the Cleveland Arts Prize in June. A native of northeast Ohio, Adams studied composition at Oberlin with Herbert Elwell and Joseph Wood, voice with Robert Fountain, and piano with Emil Danenberg. He serves as music minister and choir director at Grace Presbyterian Chuch in Lakewood, Ohio.
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In May, former Oberlin classmates and flutists Adrianne Greenbaum ’70 and Jane Lenoir ’70 teamed up with harpsichordist Derek Tam for a performance of dance, gypsy, and jazz music on historical and modern flutes in Berkeley, Calif. Dale Lewis ’73 will head the new Arts Reach Fund of the Long Island Community Foundation beginning in fall 2015. The fund addresses critical issues in the arts and arts education. Cellist Rhonda Rider ’78 performed with her trio Triple Helix at Indian Hill Music’s chamber music series in November 2014. She serves on the faculty of the Boston Conservatory. Pianist Terry Eder-Kaufman ’79 performed a program of Beethoven, Chopin, Bartók, and Dohnányi on March 28 at the Colly Soleri Music Center in Arizona. She specializes in the music of 20th-century Hungarian composers, including dances and folk tunes marking all aspects of life in rural Eastern Europe. Eder-Kaufman teaches in her independent studio in Manhattan. Also an attorney, she has served on the board of the Leschetizky Association since 2008. Michael Morgan ’79 and Robert Spano ’84 were selected from a pool of hundreds of nominees across the international performing arts community to be included among Musical America’s top 30 professionals of 2014. Morgan was also honored by the American Composers Forum Board of Directors, which named him one of three Champions of New Music for 2015. Also honored was Claire Chase ’01, flutist and artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble.
British cellist Steven Isserlis ’80 is praised for playing with “crazed brilliance” in the May issue of BBC Music Magazine, which published a five-star review of his new recordings of Prokofiev’s Cello Concerto, Op. 58 and Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 on Hyperion. Gramophone magazine called it “a fascinating...unmissable project.” Isserlis collaborated with Paavo Järvi and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra. Conductor, pianist, and composer Charles Floyd ’80 led the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s Classical Roots concert in March. The program included music by Brahms, Verdi, Samuel Coleridge Taylor, and William Dawson. The Cleveland-based periodinstrument ensemble Les Délices was featured in The New York Times and in Early Music America’s spring 2015 issue. The ensemble, which specializes in French
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Baroque music, includes Baroque cellist and gamba player Emily Walhout ’83, Baroque oboist Debra Nagy ’00, MM ’02, and harpsichordist Michael Sponseller ’97, AD ’00. The ensemble performed at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre in New York on March 28. Todd Thomas ’84 brought the role of Alberich in Wagner’s Das Rheingold to the stage of Pacific Opera Victoria in October 2014. He had “an actor’s flair, and his pursuit of the flirtatious custodians of the gold was physically nimble and vocally theatrical,” according to American Record Guide.
1990s Composer Timo Chen ’92 wrote the score for the sci-fi film Advantageous, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and captured the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Collaborative Vision. Gavin Chuck ’93 is a founding partner and managing director of Alarm Will Sound, a 20-member ensemble dedicated to pioneering new music. The group performed at Cleveland State University in March, in a program that highlighted the music of two Cleveland composers. “We want to showcase the variety and fluidity of styles that exist today,” he told The Plain Dealer. Alarm Will Sound has performed in noteworthy venues including
FLOYD: LYONSPHOTOGRAPHY.COM
In April, Sharon Davis Gratto ’66, professor and chair of the music department at the University of Dayton, received the College of Arts and Sciences’ Outstanding Faculty Service Award for her extensive work and volunteer service on the Dayton campus, in the region, and in several professional organizations in her field of choral music education and multicultural music. Gratto is a founding trustee of the newly organized Dayton Performing Arts Alliance, which unites the Dayton Opera, Ballet, and Philharmonic into one administrative unit. She is also a board member of the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, one of only five African American dance companies in the U.S.
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