Anna Skouras, Andreas Skouras - Charles Wuorinen: Chamber Music for Violin, Piano and Harpsichord (2015)

Charles Wuorinen, born on 9 June 1938 into a highly cultivated, culturally committed New York family with Finnish antecedents, began composing at the age of five and won the New York Philharmonic’s Young Composer Award at age sixteen in 1954.

In 1962, together with Harvey Sollberger and Nicolas Roussakis, he founded the pioneering Group for Contemporary Music. He continued to work intensively as a composer, pianist, conductor and composition professor at various universities, and his textbook Simple Composition of 1979 is used by students all over the world even today.

In 1970 Wuorinen was the youngest composer ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for his electronic composition Time’s Encomium. In the words of Andreas Skouras, who has made a name for him-self as a champion of contemporary music on the harpsichord and piano in equal measure: “In Charles Wuorinen’s music I am fascinated by the mixture of complexity and the musician’s joy of playing."

The violinist Anna Skouras remarks: “The two works for violin solo by Charles Wuorinen resemble each other at first glance. Both pieces are true gems in the violin literature, and I am pleased to have discovered them for myself and recorded them.”