José Serebrier

José Serebrier has earned greater recognition for his podium work than for his writing at the desk, yet during the closing years of the twentieth century and the opening decade of the twenty-first he drew considerable notice for the pieces he created. Those scores employ a tonal language that listeners find immediately engaging, while revealing an assured command of orchestral resources and a keen ear for timbral nuance. In 2021 the album Last Tango Before Sunrise appeared, featuring the composer leading performances of several of his own works.

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on December 3, 1938, Serebrier took up the violin at nine under Juan Fabbri and soon turned to composition. His earliest extant score, the Sonata for solo violin, Op. 1, dates from 1948. He later studied piano with Sarah Bourdillion and developed solid keyboard skills. After attending the Montevideo Municipal School of Music for violin and harmony, he entered the Montevideo Conservatory to work on composition with Carlos Estrada. During those student years he produced pieces such as the wind quintet Pequeña Musica (1955).

In 1956 Serebrier captured first prize in a national contest with his orchestral overture La leyenda de Fausto. He then enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music, where Vittorio Giannini guided his compositional studies. Appointed apprentice conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1958, he received the Dorati fellowship that allowed additional work at the University of Minnesota. It was there that he finished one of his major orchestral scores, the Partita, also known as Symphony No. 2 (1958). He departed Minneapolis in 1960 to lead the semi-professional Utica Symphony Orchestra. Although the salary proved modest, forcing him to supplement his earnings by teaching at Utica College and even to reside temporarily at the local YMCA, he completed the enduring Fantasia for orchestra that same year.

Serebrier obtained his first major conducting post in 1962 as associate conductor of the New York-based American Symphony Orchestra, collaborating closely with Leopold Stokowski. At Carnegie Hall that year Stokowski introduced the young composer’s Elegy for Strings. Around the same period Serebrier made his own Carnegie Hall debut leading the American Symphony Orchestra, earning warm acclaim from both critics and audiences. He moved to Cleveland in 1968 to direct the Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra while serving as composer-in-residence with George Szell’s Cleveland Orchestra. He relinquished the latter position in 1970 and the former in 1971. Throughout the seventies and eighties he undertook extensive guest engagements. His first recording, the Ives Symphony No. 4 with the London Philharmonic Orchestra on RCA, appeared in 1974 and received enthusiastic reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, culminating in a Grammy nomination.

In 1982 he became principal guest conductor of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Two years later he founded the Festival Miami, subsequently renamed the Festival of the Americas, and assumed its artistic direction. During the late eighties he forged a close association with the Belgian Radio Symphony Orchestra, producing a widely admired series of Shostakovich recordings. At that time he also began recording projects with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Rome Symphony Orchestra. His Winterreise (1999) was captured with the London Philharmonic Orchestra for the Reference Recordings label. Across his career he has accumulated forty-five Grammy nominations and secured eight Grammy Awards, one of them in 2004 for his own Carmen Symphony. He has actively promoted and documented music by numerous American composers from both the present and earlier periods, among them George Whitefield Chadwick, Charles Ives, and William Schuman. In 2021 Serebrier again led several of his compositions on the album Last Tango Before Sunrise.