Lewis Spratlan, a member of the music faculty at Amherst College from 1970 until his retirement in 2006, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2000. Recent commissions include Earthrise, for the San Francisco Opera; Streaming, a piano quartet, for the Centennial Celebration of the Ravinia Festival; Wonderer, for pianist Jonathan Biss; Shadow, for cellist Matt Haimovitz; a concerto for a consortium of 30 saxophonists; A Summer’s Day, for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and Process/Bulge, for Wet Ink. His opera Life is a Dream received its world premiere at the Santa Fe Opera in the summer of 2010.
His recently completed chamber opera, Architect, was released on a Navona CD/DVD this past July. A BMOP Sound CD of Apollo and Daphne Variations, Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra, and A Summer’s Day is currently in preparation. Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano is scheduled for release during the coming season on the Albany label. Vespers Cantata: Hesperus is Phosphorus was premiered in 2012 by The Crossing Choir and Philadelphia’s Network for New Music. He has recently completed Shining: Double Concerto for Cello and Piano, for Matt Haimovitz and Christopher O’Riley. Spratlan will be in residence at the Liguria Center for the Arts and Humanities in Bogliasco, Italy, during September 2013, where he will be at work on a new opera, Midi, a Black Medea laid on a French Caribbean island, ca. 1930.