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STRAUSS, JR.

composer

About this Artist

The music of PAUL DESENNE (Caracas 1959), performed worldwide, expresses the complex musical environments of a broad region encompassing the Caribbean, the Andes and the Orinoco-Amazon basin in a very personal way. By allowing the original, colorful voices of local cultures mix and blend in concert forms ranging from symphonies to chamber works, through various conceptual approaches, he is revealing and celebrating the multi-layered Latin American cultural horizons. (The recently premiered hour-long Sinfonía Opus 68 composed for the Simón Bolívar Symphonic Orchestra has a Scherzo beginning in the style of a tropical Mendelsohn that seamlessly grows into an explosion of Afro-Venezuelan drumming. The violin concerto "The Two Seasons" stages a tropicalized Vivaldi in an intense "Caribbean Baroque" musical style). Desenne is Resident Composer at El Sistema, a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2010 fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies; he was awarded the "Premier Prix, Premier Nommé" in cello performing at the Conservatoire Supérieur de Paris in 1985. Paul Desenne splits his time between an office in Cambridge Mass. and his home in the forest wilderness near Caracas.

Visit pauldesenne.com for more information.