STEFAN KOZINSKI – EN

Stefan Kozinski

Born in Delaware in 1953

Conductor, Organist/Pianist, Composer, Arranger

Kozinski began piano studies at age 4, and subsequently experimented as performer and composer with almost every instrument of the orchestra. At age 9, his “Suite No. 1” won the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Children’s Composition Contest. As composer-conductor, Kozinski made his debut with the Delaware Symphony at age 13, premiering his “Elegy for Orchestra”. His teachers included Nadia Boulanger, Robert Casadesus, Marcel Dupre, Vincent Persichetti, Erich Leinsdorf, and Peter Herman Adler. In 1974 Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter presented him with the Lili Boulanger Award for Composition. Nadia Boulanger described Mo. Kozinski as “one of the most gifted musicians I have met”.

After graduating Summa Cum Laude from Princeton University in 1976, Mo. Kozinski became a Coach/Conductor at the American Opera Center and at Boris Goldovsky’s summer opera institutes. From 1977 to 1982, he also conducted at Tanglewood, the Lake George Opera Festival, the New York State Festival, and frequently with the Garden State Symphonic Pops Orchestra, Riverside Orchestra, Kozinski Chamber Ensemble, as well as the Delaware, Brooklyn and New Jersey Opera Companies.

Kozinski has been re-engaged to conduct the Radio-Philharmonie Hannover in a special Christmas Concert to be broadcast on the North German Radio. Other conducting engagements in the 1997-98 season include Wagner’s FLYING DUTCHMAN for Greater Buffalo Opera and more performances of PORGY AND BESS with the New York Touring Production’s International Tour. In the 1996-97 season, Mo. Kozinski returned as conductor to that company’s tour of Asia and Australia. He led the orchestra and played keyboard in his reduced score version of Humperdinck’s HANSEL AND GRETEL for Delaware Dance Company and conducted his 40th NUTCRACKER for Alberta Ballet with the Spokane Symphony. His first organ recording by Gunther Schuller’s GM Recordings, which includes Reger’s very rarely recorded Sinfonische Phantasie und Fuge, op. 57, will be released in the spring of 1997.

He has created over 60 arrangements and orchestrations ranging from operatic reductions to symphony orchestra and from big band to solo organ. These include 13 orchestrations of Civil War-era spirituals for the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble which were critially acclaimed at their 1994 premiere in Hannover (Germany). His own compositions have been performed by many organizations, including the New England Ragtime Ensemble, United States Marine Band, and University of Delaware Resident String Quartet, as well as the orchestras cited above. He is published by E.C. Schirmer and Margun Music, and has been inducted into the Moldenhauer Archives at the Library of Congress.