Brazilian organist, born in São Paulo in 1963, José Luis de Aquino initiated his musical career with the study of piano. He started studying organ and graduated as a Bachelor at Santa Marceline College. He went on with his musical studies at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro where he presented his Master’s thesis on Cesar Franck’s works for organ.

In Paris. he attended the French organ music interpretation classes ministered by organist Suzanne Chaisemartin.

In 1981, he became the head organist of St. Benedict’s Monastery in São Paulo.

He has given ven many organ récitals both in Brazil and abroad, besides his numerous activities as a chamber musicien. He has taken part in several significant international organ festivals in Brazil, Argentine, Uruguay, Chile, The Netherlands, Hungary, France, Italy, Spain, Israel and Germany.

José Luis de Aquino is a Professer at the São Paulo State University Arts Instituts, in charge of the organ department.

He was awarded the “Revelation Prize” by the Pauliste Association Arts Critics in 1986.

He recorded the first compact dise in Brazil of organ music entitled “Passacaglia a Fuga” which includes works by Bach, Liszt, Camin and Reger.

He is the Artistic Director of the Sào Bento International Festival which has been field annually in São Paulo since 1994. The Festival received its first year, the “Grand Critic Prize”.

László Deák was born in Hungary in 1966.

After studying piano from the age of 7, he entered the Conservatory Bela BARTOK in Budapest at the age of 14, where he began his organ studies. In 1986, he was accepted at the Academy Franz LISZT in Budapest where he obtained First Prize in piano (1991) and organ (1992).

In 1993, he was awarded the Second Prize of the International Organ Competition “Franz Liszt” in Budapest, in 1994, the Second Prize in Interpretation at the International Organ Competition “Grand Prix de Chartres”, in 1998 the Third Prize and the special Prize of Pretoria (South Africa), the First Prize with honors of the UFAM (Paris) and in 1999 the André Marchai Prize in Biarritz.

At the saine time he was studied in master-classes with Marie-Claire Alain, Olivier Latry, Jacques Van Oortmerssen and Improvisation with Naji Hakim.

László Deák, while devoting himself to teaching at the Conservatory in Budapest, gives concerts in Hungary and in several other European countries : France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Roumania etc… He has made two CD’s, of which the last was released in the Fall of 1995.

http://laszlodeak.hu/

A native of Michigan, leading international concert organist Lynne Davis graduated with honors in organ performance from the University of Michigan where she studied with Robert Clark. Shortly after, she moved to France to study with Marie-Claire Alain. While there she also studied with Jean Langlais, Maurice and Marie-Madeleine Duruflé, and Edouard Souberbielle as well as other great European master organists.

For over thirty years, Lynne Davis made France her home, marrying Frenchman and Chartres International Organ Competition founder, Pierre Firmin-Didot. Between them the couple played a major role in the French organ music scene, initiating among other things the famous 1992 exhibition and recording of “Les Orgues de Paris”.

Lynne Davis’ career was launched by taking First Prize at the prestigious St. Albans International Organ Competition in England. Since then, her activities have included being a featured performer at two American Guild of Organist national conventions, a member of international organ competition juries, giving concerts, masterclasses and lectures about French organ literature and its history. Her unique living and working experience in France gives her the status of world authority in all French organ repertoire.

She holds the “Certificat d’Aptitude de Professeur d’Orgue” delivered by the Republic of France. A renowned teacher, she has served as organ professor at the Conservatory of Music in Clamart near Paris and from 1997 to 2006 at the French National Regional Conservatory in Caen in Normandy. In the fall of 2006, she was appointed Associate Professor of Organ, holding the Ann & Dennis Ross Endowed Faculty of Distinction chair at the Wichita State University School of Music in Kansas. In addition to heading the organ program, she also produces the Rie Bloomfield Organ Series and performs monthly half-hour organ recitals, the “Wednesdays in Wiedemann” series she created in 2007.

Lynne Davis performs extensively and always to enthusiastic critical acclaim both in Europe and North America. Her recordings include discs, radio broadcasts and live performances particularly on the famed organ at Chartres Cathedral in France where her disc “Musique pour Cathédrales” won the coveted French 5 Diapasons award. After Ms. Davis’ recording, “Lynne Davis en Concert” on the world-renowned Cavaillé-Coll organ at the church of St. Etienne in Caen in Normandy, her most recent CD is “Lynne Davis at the Marcussen organ in Wiedemann Hall” at Wichita State University.

In 2011, Lynne Davis received the Excellence in Creativity Award from Wichita State University. In 2012 as Lynne Firmin-Didot, she was awarded the prestigious distinction of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.

Lynne DAVIS – Chartres 2006

http://lynnedavis.net/wp/

Organist native of South Africa. Participates at the International Festival of Chartres in 1975.

Born in Victoriaville (Québec), on December 23, 1926, he received, as early as 1937, his first musical lessons from his father, Lucien Daveluy, who was organist and director of music in Victoriaville.

Raymond Daveluy studied in Montreal with Gabriel Cusson (1939-1946, musical theory) and Conrad Letendre (1942-1948, organ). In 1948, he won the Prix d’Europe and continued his organ studies in New York with Hugh Giles. Since 1946, he gives organ recitals in Canada, in the USA, in Europe and in Asia. He has been a jury member at many international competitions: Munich (1971), Philadelphia (1977), St. Alban’s (1979, 1985), and Chartres (1986). In June 1998, he was a jury member at the International Organ Competition in Calgary.

In 1959, he was the first north-american organist to participate and win the Haarlem (Holland) International Extemporization Contest.

In Montreal, Raymond Daveluy was successively organist at St. Jean-Baptiste church (1946-1951), Immaculate-Conception (1951-1954) and St. Sixte (1954-1959) before being appointed, in 1960, first organist of the prestigious Beckerath organ in the basilica of St. Joseph Oratory.

Raymond Daveluy recorded works from Bach, Marchand, Corette, Franck, Liszt and Daquin.

As a composer, Raymond Daveluy wrote many works for organ now published by Éditions Jacques Ostiguy and Éditions Europart-Music and being played in many countries. He is a certified composer from the Canadian Music Center. He has composed nearly fifteen works for organ. He also has composed a sonata for trumpet and organ, a quintet for piano and strings, and choral works. Many of his works have been recorded, namely his concerto for organ and orchestra and, lately, his five sonatas for organ on SRC label.

Raymond Daveluy is the member-founder of «Mélodistes Indépendants» (Independant Melodists), a group of creators devoted to accessible modern music, who has received remarquable public support upon its creation in 1995 and who has recently published a book Pour l’amour de la musique (For the love of music).

On top of his career as composer and recitalist, Raymond Daveluy was, until 1988, organ and extemporization teacher at both Trois-Rivières and Montréal Conservatories, two schools he was once the director, the first one from 1970 to 1974 and the second one from 1974 to 1978. Among its pupils, there are Pierre-Yves Asselin, Paul Crawford, Mireille Lagacé, Lucienne L’Heureux-Arel and Rachel Laurin.

His important contribution to the Canadian musical life has been recognized many times: member of the Order of Canada (1980), Canada 125th-Anniversary Medal (1992), «Fellow» (Honoris Causa) from the Royal Canadian College of Organists (1993) and «Honorary Member» of the Fédération québécoise des Amis de l’orgue (2002).

Xavier Darasse was born in Toulouse in 1934 and grew up in a musical family, his mother an organist. At the age of 16 he was admitted to the Conservatoire National de Paris where he won numerous awards, including first prize for Harmony and Counterpoint, Organ, Improvisation, and later first prize for Composition in the class of Olivier Messiaen. A brilliant career as a performer then unfolded for him, with concerts in Europe, Russia, the United States, Canada, and Japan. In 1966 he established the organ class at the Conservatoire de Toulouse and became the principal organizer of musical events in his city.

In 1976 he lost the use of his right arm in a tragic accident, and his career as an organist was suddenly interrupted. Darasse then turned to composition and teaching. In 1985 he was appointed professor of the Organ class in the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Lyon, and in 1991 he became Director of the Conservatoire National de Paris. He was a very gentle person and exercised his talents in various domains: composition, teaching, expertise in organ buil-ding… He died in 1992.

Xavier Darasse also participated for several years in the Académies d’été de Saint Maximin, where he gave master classes and recitals. In the 1972 concert, titled The Symphonic Turning Point, he performed works of Mendelssohn, Liszt and Franck on the Isnard organ with an impressive sound.

http://www.toulouse-les-orgues.org/le-festival/programme-2012/xavier-darasse-un-musicien-du-xxe.html

Daniel-Lesur (his real name was Daniel-Jean-Yves Lesur) was born in 1908 into a musical family.

At the Paris Conservatory, which he entered at the age of eleven, he studied with Jean Gallon (harmony) and Georges Caussade (fugue). It was, however, outside this institution that he met his most influential teacher, Charles Tournemire (with whom Daniel-Lesur’s mother, Alice Thiboust, an organist, had in earlier days studied composition and the organ). At the age of nineteen, he became deputy organist on the Cavaillé-Coll organ – a former incumbent being César Franck – in the church of Saint Clotilde in Paris. In 1935 he started to teach counterpoint at the Schola Cantorum in Paris. The following year he founded, with Yves Baudrier, André Jolivet and Olivier Messiaen, the Groupe Jeune France, which aspired to regain the spiritual drive of primordial music and to rehumanise art by rejecting the worldly neo-classicism then in vogue. After the Second World War he held eminent positions with French Radio and Television, at the Schola Cantorum in Paris (which he directed between 1957 and 1962), and at the Ministry of Culture. He died in 2002.

Daniel-Lesur had many points in common with Olivier Messiaen, whom he had met at the age of twelve on the benches of the Paris Conservatory and with whom he was to rub fraternal shoulders as far as the French Institute, where both were to be elected. Among those points were: teachers in common; the strong imprint of Tournemire; an outpouring spirituality; the organ as a laboratory for creation; monodic plainchant as an ideal of modality. In this domain, Daniel-Lesur struck out on an individual path: “I have always thought modally. Subsequently I was receptive to both the diversity and the immense possibilities of polymodality. Messiaen progressively enriched his music with elements taken from various remote types of music. For myself, I have remained more attached to the French tradition”.

Daniel-Lesur produced an important output in which all genres are represented, from opera to orchestral music, not forgetting chamber music. Yet the common denominator of his compositions seems to have been the pneuma (the human breath), and more particularly the voice, in all its dimensions: anthropological, via his fascination for extra-European music or the ambitious project of the Groupe Jeune France; existential, through the quest for the essentials of vocality, whether sung (his numerous songs) or instrumental ( Fantaisie concertante , for cello and orchestra); sacred, through his vocal production ( Le Cantique des Cantiques ) ; and poetic, thanks to his chosen bards (Heinrich Heine, Claude Roy and Cécile Sauvage, the mother of Olivier Messiaen)

Since 1996 Thomas Dahl has served as Director of Music and Principal Organist at St. Peter’s, one of the five principal churches of Hamburg, Germany. His duties there include the direction of the Hamburg Bach Choir, its subsidiary choirs, and the St. Peter’s Collegium musicum, as well as planning and execution of music for weekday, Sunday and festival services and for concerts.

In 2007 he was honored with the title of Kirchenmusikdirektor. The St. Peter’s Organ Project, providing complete renovation of the church’s three Beckerath organ, was completed in 2008. Now with 66 stops on four manuals and pedal, the grand organ is the focal point of the St. Peter’s Summer Organ Festival and the weekly Church Music Hour. Prior to his appointment at St. Peter’s, Dahl served Trinity Church (Dreifaltigkeitskirche) in Aachen and directed the Aachen Chamber Choir.

He was born in Tônning in northern Germany. After completing his secondary education, he went on to Study Church music, composition, music pedagogy, musicology and organ performance in Hamburg, Stuttgart, Paris and Chicago. His most significant organ teachers were Heinz Wunderlich, Jon Loukvik and Daniel Roth. He also coached with Wolfgang Rübsam and Jean Guillou.

Thomas Dahl has won numerous international organ competitions in performance and improvisation. Since the age of eighteen, his concert career has taken him all over Europe, to the United States, Japon and Egypt. He has performed in such venues as Notre-Dame de Paris, Thomaskirche Leipzig, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Hall and Westminster Abbey. He also has participated in the international music festivals of Paris, Moscow, Rome and Richmond, Virginia. Mr. Dahl has taught courses and seminars at conservatories around Europe and in the United States. To date he has directed three Hamburg Mcister Courses in Organ at St. Peter’s. In 2006 he spent time as Church Musician in Residence at Lenoir Rhyne College in North Carolina.

His particular interests are in the organ works of Bach, Reger and the French symphonie composers. Improvisation at the organ is another important emphasis of his work.

Thomas DAHL – Chartres 2010

http://www.sankt-petri.de/kirchenmusik/kantoren.html

Equal parts performer, composer, and educator, Matt Curlee has served on the faculty of the department of music theory at the Eastman School of Music since 2007.   As both an advocate for, and avid practitioner of improvisational music, Curlee has a particular interest in ear-brain interactions and the intuitive processes that unify composition, improvisation, and performance.  This area of research has fed directly into his work at Eastman, where he has designed an advanced skills curriculum for the undergraduate honors program. Curlee has since extended and adapted the method to serve other populations of students – core undergraduates and those pursuing graduate conducting degrees.

As a composer, Curlee’s recent work has focused on the interplay between modern theoretical and experimental physics and the arts.  Notable among these projects, Histories is a continuing set of collaborations between composer Matt Curlee and physicist Regina Demina, exploring the fundamental narratives, at various scales, that form the fabric of reality.   Recent commissions include new music for the Eastman Percussion Ensemble’s 2016-17 season, a work premiered and recorded by percussionist Michael Burritt with The United States Air Force Band in 2018, music for the Strong National Museum of Play, a piece for the cutting-edge RPS Collective, a saxophone, piano, percussion trio, and a set of arrangements celebrating the 40th anniversary of the release of Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life.

In 1996, at the age of 19, Curlee was one of the youngest organists ever to win the prestigious Grand Prix de Chartres.  After several years of touring in the US and Europe, appearances with orchestras, inaugural performances on new instruments, and two releases as a solo artist, he began to gravitate towards artistic collaborations. In 2002, with four other Eastman alums, he founded Neos, a contemporary jazz chamber ensemble built around the pipe organ.  Neos toured and recorded for several years, with Curlee serving as its artistic director and principal composer, and ran a commissioning program that generated new music from composers around the world. A native of Greensboro, North Carolina, Matt has lived in Rochester, New York since 1994, and holds two degrees and a performer’s certificate from Eastman.

Catharine Crozier was born in Hobart, Oklahoma on Jan. 18, 1914. As a child she studied violin, piano, and organ, making her first public appearance on the piano at age six. She earned a BM from Eastman School of Music, where she studied with Harold Gleason, whom she later married. In 1939 she joined the organ faculty and in 1953 was named chair of the department. Two years later she joined the faculty of Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, where she remained through 1969, serving also as organist of the Knowles Memorial Chapel.

Her concert career commenced in 1942, following her debut at the Washington D.C. National Cathedral. Thereafter she concertized throughout North America and Europe. According to her management company, Karen McFarlane Artists, Inc., Ms. Crozier was one of the three organists asked to play the inaugural organ recital at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in 1962, and was engaged for a solo recital there in 1964. In 1976 she inaugurated the Kuhn organ in Alice Tully Hall.

The New York City chapter of The American Guild of Organists named her International Performer of the Year in 1979; she held honorary doctorate degrees from Smith College, Baldwin-Wallace College, the University of Southern Colorado, and Illinois College. The Eastman School awarded her an honorary Doctor of Musical Arts in 2000.

In addition to teaching and performing, Ms. Crozier co-edited several editions of the Method of Organ Playing, written by her husband, first published in 1937 and subsequently bestowed “essential tool” status for students of the instrument. Following the death her husband, Ms. Crozier edited the seventh and the eighth editions, in 1987 and 1995.

In 1993 Ms. Crozier moved to Portland, Oregon, where she was Artist-in-Residence at Trinity Cathedral until early 2003. As Artist-in-Residence, she frequently played organ voluntaries at services, gave solo recitals and continued to teach. Her recent performances were broadcast over Oregon Public Radio and in 2001 she was a featured artist on Oregon Public Television’s Oregon Art Beat. Known for her definitive playing of organ works of Ned Rorem and Leo Sowerby, two of the five Delos International CDs she made during the last twenty years of her life included the major organ works of these two composers.

On Dr. Crozier’s 75th and 80th birthdays, she performed solo recitals from memory at The Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, CA ; her 85th birthday recital was played at The First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. Recently, the American Guild of Organists began to compile a video archive series of great organists; Catharine Crozier was the subject of The Master Series, Vol. I, which shows her performing and teaching in her 86th year.

On Friday, September 19, 2003 at the age of 89, Catharine Crozier died of complications from pneumonia following a severe stroke.