Composer
Monday
February 17, 2020
7:30 pm
WPAC Concert Hall
Sunday
February 23, 2020
11:00 am – 12:00 pm
WPAC Recital Hall
Free Admission
2020 MIGF Festival Pass
is available to attend all festival events at a single reduced price:
Fredrick Kaufman is the composer of over one hundred and thirty compositions that have been performed worldwide by orchestras such as the Warsaw Philharmonic, Israel Philharmonic, Moscow Symphony Orchestra, Moscow Chamber Orchestra, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Czech Radio Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic, Czech Symphony Orchestra, Czech National Symphony Orchestra, Jerusalem Symphony, Israel Chamber Orchestra, Moldova Symphony Orchestra, Instrumental Ensemble of Grenoble, London Sinfonietta, Orchestra Novi Musici (Naples, Italy), Novi Sad Symphony Orchestra, Dominican Republic National Orchestra, Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra, National Orchestra of Brazil, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New World Symphony, the Pittsburgh Symphony orchestras and numerous orchestras and ensembles throughout the United States. His ballets have been danced by companies such as the Royal Swedish Ballet, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the Batsheva Dance Company, the Bat-Dor Dance Company and the Pennsylvania Dance Theater.
Kaufman is a former Fulbright Scholar, and author of The African Roots of Jazz, a groundbreaking study that drew heavily on his early musical life as a jazz trumpet player with the Woody Herman Band. He is the recipient of the Darius Milhaud Award in Composition from the Aspen Music Festival, and honors and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Ford Foundations, the California, Montana and Pennsylvania Arts Councils as well as the Norwegian Government.
His Pulitzer Prize nominated Holocaust composition Kaddish, which Bernard Holland of The New York Times described as “having the most expressive writing for strings to be heard today,” has been performed over 130 times in the major concert halls of Europe, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Israel, South America, Asia and throughout the United States. His works have received prizes at international competitions and have been performed throughout the world at major music festivals. Israeli television has paid tribute to him as a composer in the thirty-minute documentary film Fredrick Kaufman-Life of an Artist.
Critics from the: New York Times, Newark Star-Ledger, Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald, Jerusalem Post, London Times, Perpignan Independent have described Kaufman’s music as “striking…individual…an interesting combination of overwhelming pathos and infectious joy…brought one into the realm of musical genius”.
His Kaminarimon (for Taiko drums and Flamenco dance) has been called “remarkable” and “stunning” and was voted as the number one classical composition of 2002 and “the most imaginative new work of the year” by music critic James Roos of The Miami Herald. String Quartet #6, “The Urban” was called “stunning” by New Yorker Magazine. The Quartet was nominated by Lukas Foss in 2007 for a Pulitzer Prize and his Grammy nominated Guernica Piano Concerto, recorded by Kemal Gekic and the Czech National Symphony Orchestra “absolutely brilliant” by the Prague Musical Review. The premiere performance took place at the Sibelius Concert Hall (Feb, ’13) in Prague and was a spectacular success. Kaufman’s recent recording Stars & Distances featuring the Florida Grand Opera was nominated for Grammy Award in 2016.
Fredrick Kaufman currently resides with his artist wife Florence Kaufman, in Miami Beach where he holds the distinguished position of Professor Emeritus in Composition at Florida International University and actively tours the world with his music.
