Yao Chen Music / 姚晨音乐

Yao Chen has been awarded the 2012 Commission from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University.   In conjunction with this esteemed honor, Yao Chen’s new work will feature pipa player Yang Wei and members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra that make up the Civitas Ensemble.  The Civitas Ensemble recently performed Yao Chen’s YEARNING for zheng and double bass in March of 2012.  For this performance, Yang Wei will be joined by CSO Assistant Concertmaster Yuan-Qing Yu on violin, J. Lawrie Bloom on clarinet, Kenneth Olsen on cello and the internationally-acclaimed Winston Choi on piano.

Founded by the patron of contemporary music, the late Paul Fromm, the Fromm Foundation is now celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Fromm Foundation at Harvard (1972) and the 60th anniversary of the Foundation itself (1952). Since the 1950s, it has commissioned well over 300 new compositions and their performances, and has sponsored hundreds of new music concerts and concert series. “I want to know you,” Igor Stravinsky once said to Fromm, “because contemporary music has many friends but only a few lovers.”

The goals of the Civ­i­tas Ensemble are to pro­vide clas­si­cal cham­ber music at the high­est pos­si­ble level to peo­ple who are pas­sion­ate about live music, to present edu­ca­tional pro­grams to young audi­ences, and also to bring music to those who would have lim­ited access to the heal­ing power of live clas­si­cal music.