Anne Marie Guzzo (b. 1968)
Anne Marie Guzzo is a Wyoming–based composer who draws on science and nature, playful absurdism, and interdisciplinary collaboration to create music that has been described as alternately moving and humorous. Guzzo has recently collaborated with vertical dancers, a geologist, a range-land ecologist, a painter, and a microbiologist, among others.
Guzzo—an internationally performed composer and professor at the University of Wyoming—is passionate about new music. She founded and directs the Wyoming Festival: New Music in the Mountains, a chamber music festival in Grand Teton National Park at the UW-National Park Service Research Station. Guzzo’s interests include the cartoon music of Carl W. Stalling, classical improvisation, and silent movie music.
Anne was the 2015–2016 composer-in-residence for the Denver-based Colorado Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Thomas A. Blomster and was one of the featured artists in the 2015 documentary film, The Ucross Experiment, which detailed a two-year collaborative residency between artists and scientists at the Ucross Foundation Artists’ Residency near Sheridan, Wyoming. Her music was recently conducted by Gerard Schwarz and performed by the University of Wyoming Collegiate Chorale and she was guest composer for the Choral Arts Institute in Los Angeles, conducted by Brandon Elliot, where her music was featured at their 2015 Beyond This World concert. Anne was a 2012 Fall Artists Resident at the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and her music was heard in 2012 in Goianiâ, Brazil at the Festival Internacional Música Clássica no Coração do Brasil as well as at the SESI Theatre’s International Women’s Day celebration. Guzzo was a 2010 composition fellow at the Cortona Sessions for New Music in Cortona, Italy. Her music has been recorded and played by the Colorado Chamber Orchestra, Allégresse trio, the Vine Orchestra, Negative Zed in BC, Canada, the Empyrean Ensemble in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Divan Consort in Los Angeles, Third Angle in Portland, Oregon, the Synchromy collective in Los Angeles, the Cheyenne Symphony Orchestra in Wyoming, and a number of other ensembles and performers.
Anne Guzzo | “Ich” (2025) | mezzo soprano, clarinet, piano
From the composer:
When clarinetist Stephanie Key asked if I might set the poem “Ich” by Ingeborg Bachmann for the fantastic new music ensemble SOLI, with superb mezzo-soprano Kelly O’Connor, I said yes immediately. In addition to the artists’ sensitivity, the text resonated with me. The poem has a timeless strength which is important to remember.
The poet, Bachmann, had to witness the Nazi Anschluss of her Austria in 1938. For me, this unbending sense of self—of holding tight to an ethical center—is of paramount importance now, and always. The repeated use of triplets represents a martial theme, but it is not the theme of the “Schicksals Härte” (the harshness of fate) or the “Menschenmacht” (power of men) or even the Nazi Anschluss. Rather, the strength of the triplets represents the resolution to be true to self.
The poem simultaneously reminded me of my German-American mother, who had just passed. She dealt with so many troubles, including Multiple Sclerosis, disability issues, and so many health problems. But she persevered with strength through all the things life threw at her.
Nicolás Lell Benavides (b. 1987)
Nicolás Lell Benavides’ music has been praised for being “resourceful and wonderfully eclectic” (Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle) and “dramatically tight and musically transporting” (SF Chronicle). He is a 2024-25 Guggenheim Fellow and has received commissions from groups like The New York Philharmonic/The Juilliard School, the LA Philharmonic with Gustavo Dudamel, Eighth Blackbird, New Century Chamber Orchestra with Daniel Hope, SFCM Orchestra with Edwin Outwater, West Edge Opera, Washington National Opera, The Glimmerglass Festival, Music of Remembrance, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Fry Street Quartet, Friction Quartet, Brightwork newmusic, and Khemia Ensemble. His music has received support from organizations such as the American Composers Forum, The Barlow Endowment, New Music USA, Opera America, the Alice M. Ditson Fund, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Nicolás’ Guggenheim Fellowship will allow him to focus on upcoming projects including his Barlow Foundation commission for Eighth Blackbird, a new song cycle to premiere with the LA Phil based on Neruda’s poetry (Sueño en mi sueño) for oboist Anne Marie Gabriele and tenor Joshua Blue commissioned by Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting, and his opera Dolores. His opera about civil rights icon Dolores Huerta, commissioned by West Edge Opera, will also premiere with San Diego Opera, The BroadStage, and Opera Southwest beginning in 2025. Dolores, with libretto by Marella Martin Koch, tells the story of a pivotal moment in civil and labor rights when the Dolores Huerta, César Chávez, and Larry Itliong coordinated the United Farm Workers to fight for Senator Bobby Kennedy be elected president to help with the Delano Grape Strike and Boycott. He is also developing an opera called Caravana de mujeres with librettist Laura Barati as part of MassOpera’s New Opera Workshop, which was a featured performance at Opera America’s New Works Forum.
He recently premiered Querencia with the New York Philharmonic and The Juilliard School Pre-College program, with support from the American Composers Forum as part of Composing Inclusion. He was a fellow at the Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab and the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, where he was part of the Composing Earth initiative. Nicolás was the first ever Young Artist Composer in Residence at The Glimmerglass Festival and has been a fellow at the Del Mar International Composers Symposium. His music has been heard all over the United States, including in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, and as part of the California Festival with New Century Chamber Orchestra and The San Francisco Girls Chorus. He was the first featured composer/conductor with the San Diego Symphony’s Currents Series in the new Jacobs Center.
He premiered a new opera for Washington National Opera called Pepito with librettist Marella Martin Koch. He and Marella also premiered a new opera, Tres minutos, with Music of Remembrance in 2022 with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the 2025-26 Composer-in-Residence with the Grammy winning San Francisco Girls Chorus, and will also be a 2025-26 visiting artist as part of Santa Clara University’s Sinatra Chair in the Performing Arts. Other upcoming projects include an upcoming album (Canto Caló) on Aerocade Records with Friction Quartet and mezzo-soprano Melinda Martinez Becker, a new work for Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Phil with filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, and a new song cycle for mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor.
Nicolás has studied at Santa Clara University, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music.
Nicolás Lell Benavides | In This Earth (2025) | mezzo soprano, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, cello, piano
From the composer:
Rudolfo Anaya is one of New Mexico’s most important artists, credited with popularizing the stories and spirit of the region. His work spans short stories, novels, plays, anthologies, and more. Growing up in New Mexico, I would meet him often when he visited schools to sign books and talk about writing. Anaya helped build the foundation that artists like me stand on when we explore New Mexican identity in our work. While I have created many projects inspired by his stories and anthologies, this is my first time setting his actual words.
In This Earth reads like a secular prayer, with repetition and ceremony built into the text itself. In the opening, Anaya seems to search in real time for those at rest in the earth who matter most: kings, saints, folktales, warriors, and finally, ancestors. The music, propelled by a solo clarinet, searches for meaning while the ground moves beneath it. Then, with an incantation and a command to rise (“bare feet dancing on earth”), Anaya sets a series of legends in motion. As each legend comes to life and we learn about the accomplishments of gods, saints, kings, and warriors, we are also forced to reckon with their suffering. La Llorona cries for the deaths of the poor and bears witness to those who would kill the earth. The piece ends like a prayer, as the singer implores us to dance as a means of remembering and reconnecting with our history, our ancestors, and our earth.
Thank you to SOLI, and especially Stephanie Key, for asking me to write this work for your 2025–26 season and for allowing me to choose a poem by Rudolfo Anaya. Thank you, Kelley O’Connor, for your radiant artistry and for inviting me to be part of your residency with SOLI. This poem feels especially meaningful as the premiere will occur just days after the birth of my second son, a moment when I will be reflecting deeply on family, lineage, ancestry, and our responsibility to the living earth.
Michael Ippolito (b. 1985)
Praised by the New York Times for his “polished orchestration” that “glitters, from big-shoulders brass to eerily floating strings,” Michael Ippolito’s music has been performed by leading musicians in venues around the world. Drawing on a rich musical background of classical and folk music, and taking inspiration from visual art, literature and other art forms, he has forged a distinctive musical voice in a body of work spanning orchestral, chamber and vocal music.
His orchestral music has been conducted by Edo de Waart, Marin Alsop, Michael Francis, David Alan Miller, and Jeffrey Milarsky in performances by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Symphony Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Nashville Symphony, Florida Orchestra, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Albany Symphony Orchestra, and Juilliard Orchestra. His chamber music has been performed by the Attacca Quartet, Miro Quartet, Hub New Music, Altius Quartet, and Dinosaur Annex, among others, and his vocal music has been championed by sopranos Joélle Harvey and Lindsay Kesselman.
He has received commissions from numerous organizations, including Carnegie Hall and The ASCAP Foundation, The Florida Orchestra, Chamber Music America, the University of Georgia Wind Ensemble, Staatstheater Darmstadt, and the New York Choreographic Institute.
He has received numerous awards, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Charles Ives Scholarship), The Juilliard School (Palmer Dixon Prize) and ASCAP (multiple ASCAP Plus Awards). Recently, his wind ensemble work West of the Sun was given an honorable mention in the 2014 Frederick Fennell Prize and his String Quartet No. 3 “Songlines” was selected 2019 Call for Scores winner by the Tesla Quartet.
He was a composer fellow at the Aspen Music Festival and the Cultivate program at the Copland House in 2012. From 2004-2011, he was a participating composer and performer in MusicX, an innovative festival of new music in Cincinnati and Switzerland, where he worked as General Manager from 2008-2011. He has also participated in the “Upbeat Hvar” International Summer School in Croatia, Yiddish Summer Weimar in Germany and the Oregon Bach Festival’s Composers Symposium.
Ippolito is currently Associate Professor of Composition at Texas State University. He studied with John Corigliano at The Juilliard School and with Joel Hoffman and Michael Fiday at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.
Michael Ippolito | The Stonecutter, from Strange Loop (2018) | violin, cello
From the composer:
Strange Loops takes its title from the concept developed by Douglas Hofstadter in his books Gödel, Escher, Bach and I Am a Strange Loop. Strange loops arise when one moves through a system in one direction, yet somehow ends up back at the beginning. While there are lots of examples in visual art (Escher’s Waterfall and Drawing Hands) and in verbal paradoxes (“This statement is false”), I became particularly interested in the ways we can experience strange loops in music.
The final movement is a set of variations structured after a Japanese folk tale, The Stonecutter. In the story, a poor stonecutter is dissatisfied with his life and believes he would be happier as a rich man. He is granted his wish by a spirit, but is immediately dissatisfied and wishes to be a prince. The spirit continues to grant each wish as the story continues. As a prince, he notices the powerful sun and wishes to take its place in the sky, but as the sun, he realizes that a cloud can obscure his light and heat. As a cloud, he realizes that a mountain can block him and is impervious to wind and rain. Finally, as a mountain, he believes he is all-powerful, until hearing a stonecutter chipping away at his feet. The stonecutter, returned to his original form, learns a valuable lesson from this very strange loop.
Peter Lieberson (1946 – 2011)
Peter Lieberson’s works first came to national attention in 1983, with the premiere of his Piano Concerto, composed for Peter Serkin and commissioned by Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) for their centennial. Andrew Porter wrote in The New Yorker that it was a “major addition to the modern concerto repertory.” It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the subsequent recording of the work won Opus Magazine’s Contemporary Music Award for 1985.
Following that work’s success, Lieberson was again commissioned by Ozawa and the BSO, which resulted in Drala (1986), “a short symphony but a profound one and, in many of its pages, a profoundly beautiful one,” according to the Boston Globe. Drala has since been performed by many of the world’s top international orchestras including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Toronto Symphony, The Cleveland Orchestra, the New World Symphony, and the London Sinfonietta.
Lieberson’s best-known work, Neruda Songs, a setting of five sonnets by Pablo Neruda for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony for Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. The world premiere took place in Los Angeles in May 2005, followed by performances with the Boston Symphony in Boston and at Carnegie Hall. Neruda Songs has also been performed frequently by soloist Kelley O’Connor with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Louisville Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony, and the Aspen Festival Orchestra, among others. The BBC Symphony with soloist Sarah Connolly presented the British premiere in 2010. Two recordings of Neruda Songs have been released: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, in one of her final performances, with the Boston Symphony and James Levine (Nonesuch, 2006) and Kelley O’Connor with the Atlanta Symphony and Robert Spano conducting (ASO Media, 2011).
Honored many times in his career — including the University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition for Neruda Songs — Lieberson’s composition was profoundly influenced by his practice of Tibetan Buddhism and in particular by the teachings of Chogyam Trungpa.
Peter Lieberson was born in New York City in 1946. He was the son of the late Goddard Lieberson, former president of Columbia Records, and the ballerina Vera Zorina. Lieberson’s principal teachers in composition were Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, Donald Martino, and Martin Boykan. After completing musical studies at Columbia University, he left New York City in 1976 for Boulder, Colorado, to continue his studies with Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist master he met in 1974. Lieberson then moved to Boston to direct Shambhala Training, a meditation and cultural program. During this period he also attended Brandeis University and received his Ph.D. From 1984 to 1988 he taught at Harvard University, and then became international director of Shambhala Training in Halifax. Beginning in 1994 he devoted his time exclusively to composition. In April 2011, Lieberson died following complications from leukemia and lymphoma.
Among Lieberson’s many awards were those from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and a Brandeis Creative Arts Award. In 2006, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Peter Lieberson’s music is published exclusively by Associated Music Publishers.
Paul Bateman (b. 1954)
Paul Bateman is a versatile conductor, pianist, and arranger with a career spanning international concert halls, opera houses, and the West End. He studied at the Guildhall School of Music and has held significant roles such as Head of Music Staff for the European Opera Centre and accompanist for the Advanced Conductors course at the Royal Academy of Music.
As a conductor, Bateman’s portfolio includes over 30 albums with the City of Prague Philharmonic, regular collaborations with the BBC Concert Orchestra, and performances with premier ensembles including the Royal Philharmonic, London Symphony, and Russian National Orchestras. He has led high-profile events such as the Nobel Peace Prize Concert, the Olivier Awards, and the 2012 London Olympics’ The Hero’s Journey. His work in musical theatre includes West End productions of The Phantom of the Opera and Singin’ in the Rain.
Bateman has recorded and performed with legendary artists across genres, including José Carreras, Bryn Terfel, Jessye Norman, Sarah Brightman, and Sir Paul McCartney. An accomplished arranger, he has collaborated with Deutsche Grammophon on projects for Daniel Hope and Piotr Beczala, and his arrangements for the group Blake earned a Classical Brit Award nomination.
As a chamber musician, he is a member of the Kammerspiel Piano Trio and founded the Castle Hedingham Music Festival. Also a dedicated composer for the church, his hymns are featured in the Rejoice and Sing anthology and published by Stainer and Bell.
Peter Lieberson | Neruda Songs (2005) | arranged for SOLI by Paul Bateman | mezzo-soprano, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, cello, piano
Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, the Neruda Songs are a cycle of five songs composed for mezzo-soprano soloist and orchestra by the American composer Peter Lieberson (1946–2011) for his wife, singer Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (1954–2006). The cycle is a setting of poems by twentieth-century Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda.
From the composer:
I discovered the love poems of Pablo Neruda by chance in the Albuquerque airport. The book had a pink cover and drew me in. As I glanced through the poems, I immediately thought that I must set some of these for Lorraine. Years later the opportunity came when the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra co-commissioned this piece from me, to be written specifically for Lorraine.
Each of the five poems that I set to music seemed to me to reflect a different face in love’s mirror. The first poem, “If your eyes were not the color of the moon,” is pure appreciation of the beloved. The second, “Love, love, the clouds went up the tower of the sky like triumphant washerwomen,” is joyful and also mysterious in its evocation of nature’s elements: fire, water, wind, and luminous space. The third poem, “Don’t go far off, not even for a day,” reflects the anguish of love, the fear and pain of separation. The fourth poem, “And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream,” is complex in its emotional tone. First there is the exultance of passion. Then, gentle, soothing words lead the beloved into the world of rest, sleep and dream. Finally, the fifth poem, “My love, if I die and you don’t,” is very sad and peaceful at the same time. There is the recognition that no matter how blessed one is with love, there will be a time when we must part from those whom we cherish so much. Still, Neruda reminds one that love has not ended. In truth there is no real death to love nor even a birth: “It is like a long river, only changing lands, and changing lips.”
I am so grateful for Neruda’s beautiful poetry, for although these poems were written to another, when I set them I was speaking directly to my own beloved, Lorraine.
