Bob Handelman Photo
Christopher Theofanidis
Composer and Yale School of Music faculty member Christopher Theofanidis has been named the winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ 2012 Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond Award, a $10,000 prize “given to a promising mid-career composer,” according to an announcement by the academy.
The academy awarded a total of $190,000 to 18 composers who were “selected by a committee of Academy members” having been “nominated by the 250 members of the Academy,” according to the organization’s announcement.
A news release issued by the Yale School of Music indicates that “Theofanidis’ works have been performed by the New York Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and he has a long-standing relationship with the Atlanta Symphony.”
Composer Reena Esmail, who earned a master of music degree from the Yale School of Music in 2011, will receive the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Walter Hinrichsen Award, and Chris Rogerson, who’ll earn a master’s degree from the Yale School of Music this year, will receive a Charles Ives Scholarship.
The Walter Hinrichsen Award recognizes the “publication of a work by a gifted composer,” according to the academy’s website, which explains that Charles Ives Scholarships in the amount of $7,500 were awarded to six “composition students of great promise.”
Esmail, who studied at Yale with Theofanidis, “is currently on a yearlong Fulbright grant to India to study Hindustani classical music with Gaurav Mazumdar in Delhi,” according to the Yale School of Music news release, which explains that “she will be returning to the U.S. to start her doctoral degree at Yale in the fall of 2012.”
Rogerson’s works, the Yale School of Music news release indicates, have been performed by such ensembles as the “New World Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic, Grand Rapids Symphony, and the New York Youth Symphony.”
The New York-based American Academy of Arts and Letters will bestow its awards in May.