Robert Stumpf writes:
>I recently received a private collection CD set of a live concert with
>Leopold Stokowski conducting the American Symphony Orchestra. Aside from
>containing the most primative, powerful and intense Carmina Burana I have
>ever heard, it also contains a piece, Canto di aspirazione, by Felix
>Labunski. The Classical Net even doesn't have any information about him.
>The music is very good. Can anyone tell me anything about him? No info is
>in the CD insert.
We used to hear a certain amount of his music in Kansas City because his
brother, Wiktor Labunski, was a professor of piano at the Kansas City
Conservatory (no the conservatory of the University of Missouri - Kansas
City). Here's what I find in Baker's:
Felix Labunski, Polish-American composer and teacher, brother of
Wiktor Labunski; b. Ksawerynow, Dec. 27, 1892, d. Cincinnati,
April 28, 1979. Brought up in a musical environment (his father, a
civil engineer, was an amateur singer; his mother played the piano),
he began playing the piano as a child; then entered the Warsaw
Conservatoire, where he was a student of Marczewski and Maliszewski.
He met Paderewski, who arranged for him a stipend at the Ecole Normale
de Musique in Paris, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger and Paul
Dukas. In 1927 he formed with Czapski, Perkowski and Wiechowicz,
the Association of Young Polish Musicians in Paris. Returning to
Poland, Labunski held the post of director of the department of
classical music of the Polish Radio in Warsaw (1934-36). In 1936 he
emigrated to America; became a naturalized citizen in 1941. He lived
in NY until 1945, when he joined the staff of the Cincinnati College
of Music, continuing in this position when it merged with the Cincinnati
Conservatory of Music in 1955; he retired in 1964 as professor emeritus
in composition. In his music, Felix Labunski remains faithful to
the legacy of Romanticism as cultivated in Poland and Russia.
Scott Morrison
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