Gregg Kallor at SubCulture: Arts Underground

In March 2007, the Abby Whiteside Foundation presented Gregg Kallor's New York concert debut in Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall. The performance featured the world premiere of Kallor's acclaimed song-cycles Exhilaration and Yeats Songs, sung by mezzo-soprano Adriana Zabala, and a rich program of solo works that showcased Kallor's versatility and his fresh approach to the piano recital. Harris Goldsmith wrote: "It took but a few impeccably shaped phrases to make it plain that Kallor is a formidably well-trained technician and a master of stylish proportion as well... This superb recital debut truly established a new, important voice in our musical annals."...

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In March 2007, the Abby Whiteside Foundation presented Gregg Kallor's New York concert debut in Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall. The performance featured the world premiere of Kallor's acclaimed song-cycles Exhilaration and Yeats Songs, sung by mezzo-soprano Adriana Zabala, and a rich program of solo works that showcased Kallor's versatility and his fresh approach to the piano recital. Harris Goldsmith wrote: "It took but a few impeccably shaped phrases to make it plain that Kallor is a formidably well-trained technician and a master of stylish proportion as well... This superb recital debut truly established a new, important voice in our musical annals."

Kallor's most recent Carnegie Hall concert, in April 2011, featured the world premiere of his nine-movement suite for solo piano, A Single Noon - a musical tableau of New York life told through a combination of composed music and improvisation. The program also included music by Béla Bartók, Chick Corea, Annie Clark (St. Vincent), Henry Mancini, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, and Louise Talma.

Kallor's recording of A Single Noon will be released in early 2013. Five-time Grammy nominee Fred Hersch calls A Single Noon "the work of an extraordinary pianist, a composer of great distinction and a true conceptualist... This ambitious and unique suite takes us somewhere that is very deeply heartfelt and dazzingly executed. This is 21st-century music that has clearly absorbed the past and looks to a bright and borderless musical future." Kallor's fetishized coffee-drinking music video, "Espresso Nirvana," is set to the sixth movement of the suite.

Kallor is the recipient of an Aaron Copland Award for composition. One of ten composers nationwide selected for this prestigious residency, Kallor composed a concerto for piano and orchestra during his time at the home of the late eminent American composer, integrating improvisation into the second movement. Kallor has also recently written several new chamber music pieces, further developing the combination of composition and improvisation in his music.

Kallor's first album, There's a Rhythm, features his jazz trio with bassist Chris Van Voorst Van Beest and drummer Kendrick Scott. "Kallor can carry a poetic mood right to the edge of sorrow, always sounding lyrical and moving" (The Hartford Courant). His second album, Exhilaration, features his song-settings of poems by Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, Christina Rossetti and Herschel Garfein sung by mezzo-soprano Adriana Zabala. Opera News wrote: "Kallor knows how to make these words sing, and Zabala gives perfect flight to them."

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