Guest Artists for 2010

Roger Behrend, Euphonium | Jens Bjørn-Larsen, Tuba | Libby Larsen, Composer

Roger Behrend, Euphonium

Roger L. Behrend is an internationally-recognized euphonium soloist, recitalist, teacher, and clinician.

A Fairfax, Virginia native, he graduated from Robinson High School before attending Michigan State University, where he studied with Dr. Leonard Falcone. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Music Education from Michigan State University and earned a Master's Degree in Euphonium Performance from George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.

Mr. Behrend recently retired as the euphonium soloist and principal euphonium with the United States Navy Band in Washington, DC, after thirty years of total military band service. While in the Navy Band, he appeared as a featured soloist throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. Prior to his tenure in the Navy Band, Roger was a member of The United States Coast Guard Band in New London, Connecticut. He has been a featured artist at numerous prestigious events including state music conventions, ITEA conventions, and The Mid-West International Band and Orchestra Clinic. Mr. Behrend has also appeared as a guest artist five times in Sapporo, Japan.

A strong proponent of the euphonium, Roger Behrend has commissioned and premiered over twenty-five works for the instrument. He has also released compact discs, which highlight the euphonium in various genres. Roger Behrend is committed to teaching students and passing on his love of music. He is currently professor of euphonium and tuba at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia and has an active private teaching studio.
Roger Behrend's attendance at the Festival is sponsored in part by Getzen Musical Instruments, distributor of Willson products.

Jens Bjørn-Larsen, Tuba

Danish-born Jens Bjørn-Larsen is one of the most sought-after tuba soloists in the world, and a highly appreciated and successful teacher of brass instruments. He has been tuba soloist in the Danish National Symphony Orchestra/DR since he was 20 and has also been a very busy chamber and ensemble musician in both the Royal Danish Brass and the Stockholm Chamber Brass.

He has won many prizes including First Prize in the 1985 Nordic Soloist Competition, the Victor Borge Grant, and First Prize at the Concours International d'Execution Musicale in Geneva in 1991. He has also been awarded the Japanese Bunkamura Prize and the European Juventus Award.

From 1987 until 2005, he held the position as principal tubist of the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, leaving in order to be able to dedicate himself exclusively to teaching and to a soloist career performing with leading orchestras in the world.

In 2002 Jens Bjørn-Larsen was appointed professor at the Hochschule für Music und Theater in Hannover, Germany, becoming the only full-time distinguished professor for tuba in Europe, and he also teaches at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen and Musikhögskolan in Malmö.

He is busy travelling as a B&S and Melton Artist, playing recitals, performing solo concerti with major orchestras and giving master classes in Europe, Japan, and the US.
Jens Bjørn-Larsen's attendance at the Festival is sponsored in part by Melton/Meinl Weston Orchestral Instruments.

Libby Larsen, Composer

Libby Larsen is one of America's most performed living composers. She has created a catalogue of over 400 works spanning virtually every genre from intimate vocal and chamber music to massive orchestral works and over twelve operas. Grammy Award winning and widely recorded, including over fifty CD's of her work, she is constantly sought after for commissions and premieres by major artists, ensembles, and orchestras around the world, and has established a permanent place for her works in the concert repertory.

The first woman to serve as a resident composer with a major orchestra, she has held residencies with the California Institute of the Arts, the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, the Philadelphia School of the Arts, the Cincinnati Conservatory, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Charlotte Symphony, and the Colorado Symphony. She has also held the Papamarkou Chair at John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress.

Larsen has been hailed as "a composer who has made the art of symphonic writing very much her own." (Gramophone Magazine), and as "a mistress of orchestration" (Times Union). Fanfare Magazine has said "her ability to write memorable new music completely within the confines of traditional harmonic language is most impressive."

As a vigorous, articulate advocate for the music and musicians of our time, in 1973 Larsen co-founded the Minnesota Composers Forum, now the American Composer's Forum, which has become an invaluable aid for composers in a transitional time for American arts.

Program Notes

World Premiere Performance
Commissioned in celebration of 25 years of Falcone Festivals

URSA
     – sings to the night sky
     – at high noon

URSA is a composition in two movements. It is music from the soul of a bear articulated through the tuba. In Mary Oliver's poem Spring she writes:

This piece gives voice to the bear, the mountain and the question, the energy of beauty, great strength and a certain fierce joy and fortitude.

Excerpted by the composer from Spring by Mary Oliver (1935- ), New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press, Boston, MA, 1992