In December, 2006, George Tsontakis was named the next recipient of the Charles Ives Living by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The prestigious award is in the form a cash allowance spread over 3 years (2007-2010) to allow the composer to concentrate on composition, and during which time he must take a sabbatical from other salaried employment. Thus, in the space of two years, Tsontakis has been awarded two of compositions richest prizes, since his Violin Concerto No. 2 also won the 2005 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award. This celebrated international composition award gives deserved recognition to a composer who already enjoys a global career. Other previous awards include the American Academy’s award for lifetime achievement in 1995; and in 2002, Tsontakis spent several months at the American Academy in Berlin as a result of the 2002 Berlin Prize (Alberto Vilar Fellowship). He also served as the first Composer-in-Residence with the Oxford Philomusica (England) from 1998-2002.
His catalogue continues to grow dramatically as prominent orchestras and musicians commission and record new works. The Millennium season alone brought performances to a dozen European countries in such venues as Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall, London’s Queen Elizabeth and Wigmore Halls, Oxford’s Sheldonian, Radio France, Auditorium Bank de Luxembourg, Athen’s Megharon and Oslo’s Gamle Logen. In the late 1990s, six CDs representing his works were released, including his acclaimed Four Symphonic Quartets with James DePreist and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo on the Koch label, and pianist Stephen Hough’s monumental Hyperion recording of the epic Ghost Variations, nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, and the only Classical recording cited in TIME magazine’s 1998 Top Ten Recordings. Two new recordings of his piano chamber music were released on Koch International Classics in November, 2004, featuring the Broyhill Chamber Ensemble and Da Camera of Houston.
The Grawemeyer Award-winning Violin Concerto No. 2 was written for violinist Steven Copes and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and premiered in 2003. Other recent premieres have included concertos for Evelyn Glennie, with the National Symphony at Carnegie Hall, and for Hornist David Jolley in Santa Fe, as well as October, a work for the Baltimore Symphony; he was also commissioned for a work to inaugurate the Aspen Music Festival’s acclaimed Benedict Music Tent in 2000, as well as a violin concerto for Cho-Liang Lin with the Oregon and Albany Symphonies. He has written a Piano Concerto, Man of Sorrows, for Stephen Hough with the Dallas Symphony and the Athens State Orchestra, which premiered in Dallas in September, 2005. He has composed works for the American, Blair, Colorado and Emerson string quartets, Da Camera of Houston, the American Brass Quintet, Orpheus, flutist Ransom Wilson, violinist Glenn Dicterow, violist Lawrence Dutton with pianist Misha Dichter, the New York Virtuoso Singers, the Broyhill Chamber ensemble, the Aspen Wind Quintet, Aureole and several American orchestras and ensembles.
Mr. Tsontakis has twice been a winner of Kennedy Center Awards — in 1989 for String Quartet No. 4 and in 1992 for the orchestral work Perpetual Angelus. He studied composition with Roger Sessions at Juilliard and conducting with Jorge Mester, and has directed the Riverside Orchestra and the Metropolitan Greek Chorale. A faculty member of the Aspen Music School since 1976, he was the founding director of the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble from 1991 until 1998. His music has been recorded on the Hyperion, New World, CRI, Koch and Opus One labels and is published exclusively by Theodore Presser.