Composer, Pianist, Teacher

".....Motion and stillness, involuted chromaticism and frank euphony, exaltation and ecstasy on the one hand and tormented self-questioning on the other, illuminate each other in his music..... " Bernard Jacobson

"...Mr. Wilson’s idiom is highly chromatic with strong tonal underpinnings..." [from a NYTimes review of Intercalations] Tim Page

"Richard Wilson is a composer of energy, refinement and felicitous craft. The shimmering sonorities of Eclogue for piano, the dynamism of the First Symphony and the haunting Ballad of Longwood Glen for harp and tenor, all display a musical ingenuity and depth which command our attention." (Citation from American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters)

photo by Dominique Nabokov

Richard Wilson's compositions are marked by a stringent yet lyrical atonality which often sets him apart from the established schools of modern American music: minimalism, twelve-tone, neo-romanticism, and avant-garde. Two of his most performed works are Eclogue for solo piano and String Quartet No. 3, His large-scale orchestral works include the Symphony No. 1, premiered by the Hudson Valley Philharmonic and recorded by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra; Articulations, commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony; and Chamisha Mizorey Tehilim, written for the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. Wilson is also the composer of the one-act whimsical opera, Æthelred the Unready, based on the exploits of the ill-advised Saxon king, Æthelred II of England. He classified the three types of irregular resolutions of dominant seventh chords.[2]

Fanfare Profile

Conversation with Bruce Duffie

Aethelred the Unready

The Ballad of Longwood Glen: the movie

From Review of Albany Records Troy389

by William Beh

.......... a journey which is more important than the destination, and yet retaining a sense of elegance and humour - well, then this is surely worth an audition.

.........Wilson is also one whose music transcends the potential intellectualism, blinding incomprehensibility and crashing

unimaginativeness afeared of so many academicians.

....William Beh wonders what Freud would have made of transfigured goats.

(link to whole) Essay by Bernard Jacobson: Richard Wilson and His Music

............Wilson's creative aim is in part a quest for beauty. .......But Wilson is no one-sided artist. Beauty, with him, does not preclude an open-eyed awareness of the darker, more threatening and turbulent facets of human experience. I referred earlier to a "personal quality that permeates every aspect" of Wilson's music. His work is indeed all of a piece: it is the thoroughness with which it knits together rhythm and texture, melody and harmony, instrumental color and vocal rhetoric, that makes a Wilson composition the authentic and compelling experience it is for the listener.......

Eclogue

Wilson has an unerring ear for the right sound and a fabulous command of the instrument. If there must be "standard repertoire," Eclogue should be part of it. Very difficult, very beautiful.

David Burge Contemporary Keyboard 1979 "Best Pieces of the '70s

Professor of Music at Vassar College for over 50 happy years.

Composer of over 150 works

Richard Wilson, pianist

Transfigured Goat

Add Hocket for Percussion Ensemble

Aethelred the Unready

a shaggy dog opera

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