Michael Torke The music of Michael Torke has been called 'some of the most optimistic, joyful and thoroughly uplifting music to appear in recent years' (Gramophone, August 1996). Hailed as a 'vitally inventive composer' (Financial Times of London, February 25, 1995) and 'a master orchestrator whose shimmering timbral pallete makes him the Ravel of his generation' (New York Times, June 30, 1996), Michael Torke has created a substantial body of works in virtually every genre, each with a characteristic personal stamp that combines restless rhythmic energy with ravishingly beautiful melodies.

Torke's most recent orchestral work is Javelin (1994), a 'sonic olympiad' commissioned by the Atlanta Committee for the Olympics in celebration of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra's 50th Anniversary Season. In the spring of 1996, two different recordings of Javelin were simultaneously released - a rare occurence for a contemporary composition. The first recording, which features the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra conducted by Yoel Levi, was the fourth all - Torke CD to be released by Decca's Argo label. The second recording is on Sony Classical's Summon the Heroes, the official centennary Olympics album featuring the Boston Pops conducted by John Williams, which is the Number One CD on Billboard's Classical Crossover Chart.

Other recent compositions include: December (1995) for string orchestra; Nylon (1994) for guitar and orchestra; July (1995) for saxophone quartet; and a Soprano Saxophone Concerto (1993), which has been recorded twice in the last year. Vocal music has played a prominent role in Torke's recent output. In Four Proverbs (1993) for female voice and ensemble, Torke manipulates words in the same way he has manipulated thematic cells in his earlier works and, in so doing, creates a unique symbiotic relationship between language and music. This technique is further explored in his most recent work - Book of Proverbs World Premiere 1996, for soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra - which received its world premiere in Holland in September 1996, with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir conducted by Edo de Waart. His opera King of Hearts (1993), which was commissioned for British television (Channel 4) and broadcast in January 1995, recently received its stage premiere at the 1996 Aspen Festival.

With two of his most widely-performed works, Ecstatic Orange and The Yellow Pages (both written in 1985 while Torke was a composition student at Yale), Torke practically defined post-minimalism, a music which utilises the repetitive structures of a previous generation to incorporate musical techniques from both the classical tradition and the contemporary pop world. From these initial kinetic scores, Torke's music has developed toward larger, more expansive forms allowing for greater textural variation and longer, sweeping themes. Over the past decade, Torke's vibrant music has strongly appealed to choreographers including: Ulyssees Dove (Alvin Ailey), James Kudelka (San Francisco Ballet), Jiri Killian (Netherlands Dance Theatre), Glen Tetley and Peter Martins (New York Ballet), who has choreographed seven of Torke's compositions to date (four of which were NYCB commissions). Many of these works can be heard on the five Decca / Argo CD's devoted to his music.