Alfred Prinz 75th Birthday Concert
Wed June 8, 8 pm Auer Hall
Howard Klug, Jorge Montilla, David Shea, Nicolas del Grazia, Randy Salman, Daniel Healton, clarinets

Prinz: Bloomington Quartet; Prinz: Scherzo Fantastique; Prinz: Trio (1997); Kibbe: Quartet No. 3; Prinz: Sextet; Brahms: Sextet, Op. 18

Alfred Prinz was a member of the clarinet section of the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic for 50 years, most of which were spent as solo clarinetist. Professor Prinz joined the Vienna State Opera Orchestra in 1945, at the age of 15, and went on to perform for most of the great artistic personalities of his time: Furtwängler, Mitropoulos, Bruno Walter, Knappertsbusch, Schuricht, Bernstein, Karl Böhm, Ormandy, Solti, Szell, Monteaux, Krips, Karajan, and Guilini.

As a member of the Wind Soloists of the Vienna Philharmonic (1954-1970) and the Vienna Chamber Ensemble (1971-1986), Prof. Prinz has performed and recorded all the standard clarinet chamber music repertoire. In addition to his clarinet activities, he completed his piano studies with Bruno Seidlhofer at the Hochschule in Vienna from 1942-1949.

Mr. Prinz composed principally on vacations during his half-century with the Vienna State Opera in all genres except opera: seven symphonies; two clarinet concertos; single concertos for violin, piano, bassoon, and flute; five piano sonatas; many chamber music works; a few songs; and several clarinet pieces (duets, trios, quartets, and quintets).

In his own words, “My style has been somewhere between Bartók, Prokofiev, and Hindemith, but in the last few years, I have gone more and more back to tonality. It is very important to me as a composer to create works which allow the performers to make music in as vigorous and natural a way as possible. I believe this naturalness in performance was a quality which had been lost during the period of dodecaphony.”