“They played with exhilarating confidence and verve ... fluid, fluent, and lithely balletic.” – THE STRAD MUSIC FROM COPLAND HOUSE is the internationally-acclaimed touring, resident ensemble based at Aaron Copland's National Historic Landmark home, an award-winning creative center for American music. With “all the richness of its offerings (The New York Times), and its unique focus on past and present American musical creativity, MCH devises ear-opening, mind-expanding adventures within broad historical and cultural contexts. The only American repertory ensemble ranging widely across 150 years of the U. S. musical landscape Music from Copland House (MCH) provocatively unites past and present, and its programs reimagine the entire concert experience through content, format, and presentation. The ensemble’s adventurous and exhilarating concerts link America’s composers to their musical and cultural ancestry and to the wider worlds of literature, theater, painting, history, nature, and science. MCH has been engaged by Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress, Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, Merkin Hall, University of Chicago, Middlebury Performing Arts, Columbia University's Miller Theatre, the Caramoor, Tanglewood, Cape Cod, Bard, SONiC, and Ecstatic Music Festivals, and many other leading North American concert presenters. The ensemble has also appeared at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, the Universities of Louisville, Buffalo, and South Carolina, Brandeis and Auburn Universities, and many others, and has collaborated with the European Broadcasting Union and National Public Radio on a special production showcasing American music and aired in over 20 European countries, and has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning, and in other leading media. MCH is in its 11th season at its popular mainstage concert series in Westchester County, near New York City. “Even when Copland is not on the bill, his spirit guides the programming” (The New York Times). Its vibrant concerts have explored the literary voices of Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Billy Collins; journeyed into the jazz clubs of Harlem, the churches of the South, and the fields of the American heartland; and travelled widely to Latin America, Asia, and Middle East. MCH’s active repertoire includes over 300 works by over 100 American composers, reaching back deep into the 19th century and forward to newly- created pieces. It has commissioned over 50 compositions, including Sebastian Currier’s Static, which won the highly-coveted Grawemeyer Award. Following widely-praised CDs on Arabesque (the first complete cycle of Copland's chamber music) and Koch International (devoted, respectively, to music by Currier and John Musto), the ensemble has a growing discography on the COPLAND HOUSE BLEND label, which includes new or forthcoming recordings of chamber works by Pierre Jalbert, Robert Xavier Rodriguez, and William Albright. Inspired by Copland's peerless, lifelong advocacy of American composers, MCH also offers children's and family programs, master classes, lectures, residencies, creative and career workshops, mentoring programs, and other educational and community outreach activities. Several of its school partnerships were recognized by the Yale Distinguished Music Educator Award. MCH's exceptional Founding Artists are widely admired for their instrumental command and musical insights in works both old and new: clarinetist-composer Derek Bermel, pianist and Copland House Artistic and Executive Director Michael Boriskin, flutist-conductor Paul Lustig Dunkel, violinist Nicholas Kitchen (of the Borromeo String Quartet), and cellist Wilhelmina Smith (of the Variations string trio). Essential to the ensemble’s dynamic artistry, character, and many successes are its stellar rosters of Principal and Guest Artists. FOUNDING ARTISTS Derek Bermel Michael Boriskin Paul Lustig Dunkel Nicholas Kitchen Wilhelmina Smith Clarinet Piano Flute Violin Cello PRINCIPAL AND GUEST ARTISTS Curtis Macomber (violin) ● Jesse Mills (violin) ● Harumi Rhodes (violin) ● Charles Yang (violin) ● Danielle Farina (viola) Kathryn Lockwood (viola) ● Nicholas Canellakis (cello) ● Alexis Pia Gerlach (cello) ● James Wilson (cello) Michael Barrett (piano) ● Margaret Kampmeier (piano) ● John Musto (piano) ● Linda Chesis (flute) Moran Katz (clarinet) ● Carol McGonnell (clarinet) ● Meighan Stoops (clarinet) Kory Grossman (percussion) ● Ian David Rosenbaum (percussion) ● Amy Burton (soprano) Rachel Calloway (mezzo-soprano) ● Eve Gigliotti (mezzo-soprano) James Martin (baritone) ● Jorell Williams (baritone) and many more! PRESS NEW YORK TIMES “All exuberance and bright sunshine. What a well-prepared and confidently managed evening it was.” GRAMOPHONE “The players who make up Music from Copland House sounds like they relish every phrase.” AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE “A grand and stirring performance. The music came through with searing clarity.” THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE “Excellent musicians in vital performances… Copland would have been proud of all of them.” LOS ANGELES TIMES "A compelling and carefully crafted program, beautifully and seductively played." GRAMOPHONE “Essential, a simply splendid collection…undoubtedly the finest performances available of most of these works (Copland Chamber Music).” PENINSULA REVIEWS “Music from Copland House has built a sterling reputation as a repertory ensemble championing American Music. One has to marvel at the extraordinary artistic quality of these fine musicians, for the playing we heard was absolutely fabulous…The energy level was white hot and totally thrilling.” BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE “In short, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying programme, expertly played by the members of Music from Copland House.” PERFORMANCE: 5 SOUND: 5 TIME OUT NEW YORK (5 Stars) On the Verge, Music from Copland House (Koch International Classics) “A new Koch disc of [Currier’s] chamber music—including the award-winning composition, Static—is like an open-throttle tour through a voracious, ironic, zany and profound musical mind capable of terrifying, turn-on-a- dime revelations. These pieces make for exciting listening…the players of Music from Copland House prove ideal interpreters, careering with fastidious abandon among Currier’s many moods—never falling into chaos, but always, appropriately, on the verge.” ALLMUSICGUIDE.COM “Musto loves jazzy phrases and a "big city" kind of New York cosmopolitan idiom…He could hardly wish for a better advocate in the crack players in Music from Copland House.” MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL (UK) “The caliber of musicianship here could be a model for chamber music camaraderie. Watching these players interact with each other was a pleasure all in itself.” AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE “Music from Copland House is our paramount keeper of Copland’s flame.” NEW YORK TIMES "Beguiling and bracing, incisive and exciting." The Sound of Mavericks at Copland House By PHILLIP LUTZNOV. NOV. 27, 2015 At Copland House, Michael Boriskin at the piano, Nicholas Kitchen on violin and Wilhelmina Smith on cello at a rehearsal. Credit Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times The sun was setting outside Aaron Copland’s home in Cortlandt Manor as November winds began to blow. But inside, amid the cozy music room, the rehearsal was heating up as the pianist Michael Boriskin and the ensemble Music From Copland House rendered a rousing version of Charles Ives’s epic Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano. Ives’s trio, completed in 1911, is a wild ride whose innovative use of the vernacular — songs like “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Rock of Ages” are abstracted and woven into its fabric — places it among the works that might, in another time, have earned Ives the status later conferred widely on Copland as the man who defined an American identity for the concert stage by incorporating popular American idioms in works like “Billy the Kid,” “Rodeo” and “Appalachian Spring” in the 1930s and ’40s. People look to Copland as defining that identity, said Mr. Boriskin, the executive and artistic director of Copland House, during a break in the rehearsal. “But how could he define it when Ives wrote all of those American-sounding pieces 20 years earlier? The answer is that Ives was writing in obscurity.” Teasing out such quirks of history is one aspect of what Copland House is about. Dedicated to the creation and presentation of American music, the organization focuses on illuminating essential truths about the music. In the process, its programming reveals a web of influences and interests that have shaped it. Copland became an early champion of Ives’s work, presenting some of his songs as early as the 1920s and, Mr. Boriskin said, regarding him as a fellow traveler in the effort to challenge the European musical establishment and establish a recognizably American sound. In that spirit, the Ives trio, which Mr. Boriskin and his colleagues — Nicholas Kitchen on violin and Wilhelmina Smith on cello — were rehearsing for what proved a well-received concert on Nov. 15, will lead logically to Copland House’s next program, on Dec. 6, titled “American Mavericks.” “A piece like this could fit beautifully on that program,” the violinist Tim Fain said, referring to the Ives trio. Mr. Fain will be featured at the Dec. 6 concert at the Merestead estate in Mount Kisco, which Copland House uses as its main performance space. Mr. Boriskin, the executive and artistic director of Copland House, in rehearsal. Credit Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times That program will open with piano pieces by an Ives contemporary,