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Kati Agócs
composer

“Known for its elemental strength and generous lyricism” (The New Yorker), the music of Kati Agócs is performed by leading musicians worldwide. The Boston Globe has called it “music of fluidity and austere beauty…with a visceral intensity of expression.” The New York Times has characterized it as “striking…her vocal music has an almost nineteenth-century naturalness.” A recent Guggenheim Fellow, Kati is also a winner of the prestigious Arts and Letters Award, the lifetime achievement award in music composition from The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

World premieres this season include Voices of the Immaculate, commissioned by Miller Theatre for her Composer Portrait Concert and described by The New York Times as “a simmering new cantata, conceived with transparency as a first principle…entirely, word for word lucid”; her Horn Concerto for James Sommerville; and a choral piece commissioned by Boston’s Emmanuel Music in celebration of their Fiftieth Anniversary. Kati is currently writing a Piano Concerto for Nicolas Namoradze, commissioned by the Esther Honens International Piano Competition in Calgary for premiere in the 2022/23 season. Her music has been commissioned and performed by many other premier ensembles and organizations, including the Toronto Symphony, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, the Vancouver Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Ensemble Reconsil Vienna, Lontano, Albany Symphony Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival, Continuum, Da Capo Chamber Players, Ensemble Contemporain de Montreal, New Juilliard Ensemble, and the multiple-Grammy Award-winning ensemble Eighth Blackbird, who toured the U.S. with Immutable Dreams.

Among her most recent works, Imprimatur (String Quartet #2) opened the Aspen Music Festival in 2018 as a joint commission from the Aspen Music Festival, Harvard Musical Association, and Krannert Center/University of Illinois for the Jupiter String Quartet, and her Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra, commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, was premiered by Nicholas Kitchen and the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble, conducted by Frank Epstein. She has been nominated for two JUNO Awards: one in 2017 for The Debrecen Passion, a work for chorus and orchestra with texts by Szilárd Borbély, and one in 2022 for Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra.

Born in Canada of Hungarian and American parents, Kati earned Doctoral and Master's degrees from Juilliard, studying with Milton Babbitt, and has served on New England Conservatory’s composition faculty since 2008. She is also an alumna of the Aspen Music School, Tanglewood Music Festival (where she held the ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Fellowship), Sarah Lawrence College, and Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific (United World Colleges), where she represented the province of Ontario. She maintains a composition studio in Flatrock, Newfoundland.

Kati Agócs
composer

“Known for its elemental strength and generous lyricism” (The New Yorker), the music of Kati Agócs is performed by leading musicians worldwide. The Boston Globe has called it “music of fluidity and austere beauty…with a visceral intensity of expression.” The New York Times has characterized it as “striking…her vocal music has an almost nineteenth-century naturalness.” A recent Guggenheim Fellow, Kati is also a winner of the prestigious Arts and Letters Award, the lifetime achievement award in music composition from The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

World premieres this season include Voices of the Immaculate, commissioned by Miller Theatre for her Composer Portrait Concert and described by The New York Times as “a simmering new cantata, conceived with transparency as a first principle…entirely, word for word lucid”; her Horn Concerto for James Sommerville; and a choral piece commissioned by Boston’s Emmanuel Music in celebration of their Fiftieth Anniversary. Kati is currently writing a Piano Concerto for Nicolas Namoradze, commissioned by the Esther Honens International Piano Competition in Calgary for premiere in the 2022/23 season. Her music has been commissioned and performed by many other premier ensembles and organizations, including the Toronto Symphony, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, the Vancouver Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Ensemble Reconsil Vienna, Lontano, Albany Symphony Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival, Continuum, Da Capo Chamber Players, Ensemble Contemporain de Montreal, New Juilliard Ensemble, and the multiple-Grammy Award-winning ensemble Eighth Blackbird, who toured the U.S. with Immutable Dreams.

Among her most recent works, Imprimatur (String Quartet #2) opened the Aspen Music Festival in 2018 as a joint commission from the Aspen Music Festival, Harvard Musical Association, and Krannert Center/University of Illinois for the Jupiter String Quartet, and her Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra, commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, was premiered by Nicholas Kitchen and the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble, conducted by Frank Epstein. She has been nominated for two JUNO Awards: one in 2017 for The Debrecen Passion, a work for chorus and orchestra with texts by Szilárd Borbély, and one in 2022 for Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra.

Born in Canada of Hungarian and American parents, Kati earned Doctoral and Master's degrees from Juilliard, studying with Milton Babbitt, and has served on New England Conservatory’s composition faculty since 2008. She is also an alumna of the Aspen Music School, Tanglewood Music Festival (where she held the ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Fellowship), Sarah Lawrence College, and Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific (United World Colleges), where she represented the province of Ontario. She maintains a composition studio in Flatrock, Newfoundland.