“This is music that demands to be heard.”
-David DeBoor Canfield, Fanfare Magazine“You’re a hopeless romantic.”
-Leonard Bernstein to Joel Feigin at a private composition lesson at Tanglewood in 1981
Joel Feigin is an internationally performed composer, whose operas, chamber, orchestral, and piano works have been widely praised for their “very strong impact, as logical in musical design as they are charged with emotion and drama.” (Opera Magazine)
Feigin’s operas are at the center of his work. They have been widely produced, with performances in Russia (the Moscow Conservatory), in North Carolina, Chicago, and southern California, where his second opera, Twelfth Night, brought the “audience spontaneously to their feet. Feigin’s magical score is…a sleeper that deserves to be in the repertory of major opera houses.” (Bravo California). Feigin is presently working on a third opera, Outcast at the Gate. After seeing a New York workshop, critic James Grant wrote that “this wonderful new opera is a closely observed mirror of our time.”
Instrumental commissions include Aviv: Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra, written for Yael Weiss on Fromm commission, and heard on Feigin’s latest, widely praised CD, Music for Chamber Orchestra (Toccata Classics). In David DeBoor Canfield writes that “this music demands to be heard”; Ken Meltzer finds it “an immensely gratifying experience…totally convincing and communicative.” Other all-Feigin CDs include Lament Amid Silence (MSR), and the two-CD set Transience (Albany), which critic Hubert Culot termed a “comprehensive survey of Feigin’s sincere, communicative, and deeply felt music.”
Dr. Feigin is Professor Emeritus of Composition at the University of California, Santa Barbara who studied with Nadia Boulanger and Roger Sessions. Honors include a Mellon Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Senior Fulbright Professorship, and the Edward A. Dickson Emeriti Professorship of the University of California, Santa Barbara. A long-time student of Zen Buddhism, Feigin studied for many years with the late Sojun Mel Weitsman Roshi.
The Joel Feigin Collection at the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center opened in 2011.