Listen to an excerpt of Messages to Myself, movement 2

CHRISTOPHER THEOFANIDIS (b. 1967 in Dallas, Texas) has had performances by many leading orchestras from around the world, including the London Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Moscow Soloists, the National, Atlanta, Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, and California Symphonies, and many others. He also served as Composer of the Year for the Pittsburgh Symphony during their 2006-2007 Season, for which he wrote a violin concerto for Sarah Chang.

Mr. Theofanidis holds degrees from Yale, the Eastman School of Music, and the University of Houston, and has been the recipient of the International Masterprize (hosted at the Barbican Centre in London), the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, six ASCAP Gould Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Tanglewood Fellowhship, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Charles Ives Fellowship. In 2007 he was nominated for a Grammy for best composition for his chorus and orchestra work, The Here and Now, based on the poetry of Rumi. His orchestral concert work, Rainbow Body, has been one of the most performed new orchestral works of the last ten years, having been performed by over 100 orchestras internationally.

Mr. Theofanidis’ has recently written a ballet for the American Ballet Theatre, a work for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra as part of their ‘New Brandenburg’ series, and he currently has two opera commissions for the San Francisco and Houston Grand Opera companies. He has a long-standing relationship with the Atlanta Symphony, and has just had his first symphony premiered and recorded with that orchestra. He has served as a delegate to the US-Japan Foundation’s Leadership Program and is a former faculty member of the Peabody Conservatory and the Juilliard School. He currently teaches at Yale University. For more information, visit www.theofanidismusic.com.

About Messages to Myself:

I wrote these four unaccompanied choral works at the request of my friend, Robert Simpson, and his excellent group, The Houston Chamber Choir. I had been thinking of all the poetry that had been meaningful to me personally over the years, and I decided to choose four of those poems which seemed to have particular staying power in my life and have become a resonating chamber for my way of thinking. The first is an excerpt from a poem of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The second was written by Jelaluddin Rumi, the medieval Persian mystic whose work I have set before in my large scale work, The Here and Now, for chorus and orchestra (translation by Coleman Barks). The third poem is from Amy Kirsten, a kindred spirit whose words and generosity have meant an enormous amount to me personally in recent years. The final poem is an excerpt of one of my favorite by William Butler Yeats – “When You Are Old”. I dedicate this work to my daughter, Isabella. – Christopher Theofanidis