David Hertzberg Wins Gotham Chamber Opera's Catherine Doctorow Prize for Music

Gotham Chamber Opera and the Jarvis & Constance Doctorow Family Foundation have announced that David Hertzberg will be the inaugural winner of the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Music, a competitive prize awarded to a composer to support the creation of a new concert work for voice and chamber ensemble. For more information on the award and its requirements, visit www.gothamchamberopera.org/registration. The Prize Jury found Mr. Hertzberg's music to offer "an extraordinarily beautiful sound world with a unique and distinguishing vocabulary," containing "deeply affecting emotional content," and felt that Mr. Hertzberg has the potential to contribute a new work of substance to the concert repertoire for voice.

The Catherine Doctorow Prize for Music is a new award of $15,000 to a composer for the creation of a new concert work for solo voice and chamber ensemble of between 3 and 10 acoustic instruments and between 15 and 30 minutes in length. Given the inherent challenges of writing idiomatically for the human voice, a goal of the competition is to successfully enlarge the repertoire of concert works for voice and instruments. Mr. Hertzberg's completed work will be premiered in a concert presented under the aegis of Gotham Chamber Opera. Additional funding for the premiere is generously provided by the Hegardt Foundation.

David Hertzberg was born in 1990 and holds Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Samuel Adler. He is currently pursuing an Artist Diploma at The Curtis Institute of Music, studying with Jennifer Higdon, and has also studied at the the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt, the Freie Universität, Berlin, and the Aspen Music Festival, where he studied with George Tsontakis. He was also a fellow at the European American Musical Alliance in Paris and The Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, where he studied with Anders Hillborg and Steven Stucky. In the summer of 2013 he completed a residency at Yaddo and was an inaugural participant in the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival's Young Composer Program. In the summer of 2014 he will be a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. In 2011, David received the Arthur Friedman Prize from The Juilliard School for composing the score deemed most outstanding in their annual competition for orchestral works. Shortly afterwards, he received the 2011 William Schuman Prize from BMI, another prize awarded to the most distinguished submission in their annual composer awards. In 2012, he was awarded a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, an Aaron Copland Award from Copland House, and a Jerome Fund Commission from the American Composers Forum. He was also named Composer-In-Residence for Young Concert Artists, a post which he will hold through 2014.

Jury for the inaugural round of the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Music:

Yves Abel: conductor; Chief Conductor Designate 2015, Nordwest Deutsche Philharmonie; Music Director, L'Opéra Français de New York; Former Principal Guest Conductor, Deutsche Oper Berlin

David Bennett: Executive Director, Gotham Chamber Opera; Vice-Chair, Opera America Board of Directors

Kevin Burdette: bass; principal artist (Metropolitan Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Teatro Colón) and soloist (Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra), world premieres with Santa Fe Opera, Gotham Chamber Opera, and Boston Lyric Opera.

Neal Goren: conductor; Founding Artistic Director, Gotham Chamber Opera

Nancy Allen Lundy: soprano; New York City Opera; Houston, Netherlands, La Scala, Lyon, English National, Vancouver Opera companies; soloist, Montreal Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, NHK Symphony, Tokyo.

Sato Moughalian: flutist; Principal Flute, Gotham Chamber Opera, Perspectives Ensemble, L'Opéra Français de New York American Modern Ensemble; Artistic Director, Perspectives Ensemble; consultant, Gotham Chamber Opera

Alan Pierson: conductor; Artistic Director, Alarm Will Sound; former Artistic Director, Brooklyn Philharmonic.

Catherine Doctorow was a serious and prolific painter whose work, in a contemporary idiom, flourished in the 1950s and '60s. The Catherine Doctorow Prize for Music is the third of three major recurring prizes to be established by her family and the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation to honor and perpetuate Doctorow's love of innovative literary fiction, the visual arts, and music.

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