Richard Danielpour was born in New York City in 1956. A graduate of the New England Conservatory and the Juilliard School of Music, he studied with composers Vincent Persichetti and Peter Mennin, as well as with pianists Lorin Hollander, Veronica Jochum, and Gabriel Chodos. He is one of the most gifted composers of his generation and exerts considerable influence upon younger composers.
Danielpour has received commissions from the symphony orchestras of New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Orange County, California (the Pacific Symphony), Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, as well as from the Orchestre National de France, Stuttgart Radio Orchestra, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, American Composers Orchestra, and other institutions and organizations. In addition, he has written music for the New York City and Pacific Northwest Ballets.
Proponents of his music include instrumentalists Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax, Gary Graffman, and Christopher O’Riley; singers Jessye Norman, Dawn Upshaw, Frederica von Stade, and Thomas Hampson; chamber music ensembles such as the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio and the Guarneri, Emerson, Muir, and American String Quartets; and conductors David Zinman, Charles Dutoit, Kurt Masur, Zdenek Macal, Leonard Bernstein, Carl St. Clair, and Leonard Slatkin.
Danielpour is the only living composer with an exclusive recording contract with Sony Classical (Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland had similar contracts). Among Danielpour’s Sony recordings are the Grammy Award-winning Cello Concerto, played by Yo-Yo Ma and the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of David Zinman, and the Grammy-nominated Concerto for Orchestra, performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony, also under Zinman’s direction.
Danielpour’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the Rockefeller and Barlow Foundations. In 1982, he won Columbia University’s Joseph H. Bearns Prize (awarded to an American aged eighteen to twenty-five for an outstanding musical composition), and the American Academy of Arts and Letters has awarded him a Charles Ives Fellowship (1983) and a Lifetime Achievement Award. He has enjoyed residencies at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and at the Yaddo artist’s retreat, outside Saratoga Springs in New York. In the fall of 2002 he was awarded the Alberto Vilar Fellowship and Residency at the American Academy in Berlin.
Richard Danielpour currently serves as composer-in-residence on the faculties of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and the Manhattan School of Music in New York. He pursues his ardent educational interests further by conducting master classes around the country, and by coaching and mentoring young musicians.