Steve Dobrogosz Website

Update August

My 2nd and last solo piano album of covers - Harmony, songs by Elton John - was recorded last month in Oslo by Jan Erik Kongshaug in his Rainbow studio. Christmas release on Norwegian Curling Legs.

An EP of live recordings from Celebratory Music for pipe organ, performed by the excellent British organist Andrew Canning is up now at iTunes. Also up at iTunes - my first choir recording The Child's Gift (1986) with my then vocal ensemble and jazz trio, remastered.

Arigato gozaimasu to conductor Yoshiyuki Ueda and his Vivo Choir for very beautiful performances of my Japanese Koiuta songs at the Choral Messe Festival 2010.

A live concert at the Swedish Radio in which the dynamic duo does covers (link above the picture). Anna's site has upcoming tour dates. We're gearing up for our 3rd album...

My son Jonathan's 3rd smooth jazz CD Diamonds is making waves and can be ordered here at amazon US.

A CD of my more difficult notated piano music, including Spanish Steps, will be up at iTunes later in the fall.

Golden Slumbers is out in Japan. An interview in Jazz Tokyo.

Many thanks to Daniel Mahraun and the Bethany College choir for the midwest US premier of Te Deum in Kansas.

And thanks to conductor Ragnhild Kjöllerström and the Con Anima women's choir for a moving performance of Magnificat in Stockholm. I enjoyed rediscovering this piece from 2002.
Magnificat is now available in a new arrangement for women's choir and strings (string orchestra or quintet).

The surround-sound double-CD of my "Shakespeare oratorio" My Rose is at iTunes, Premiere Classical and Linn Records

a review

Number of compositions has passed the 800 mark.

Performances are being planned in Sweden, Norway, Cyprus, Singapore and the US. Requiem had a successful US premier and likewise in Japan, as did the Koiuta songs. My Rose will have premiers in Germany and the US in 2011.

Recent compositions:
The Green Hills Of Earth - men's choir/piano
Singapore Songs - choir, comp group
World - 1-6, 6-handed piano
Cradle Songs - piano
Minerva/Dorable, Hamadryad/Lleta/Ishtar - suites for violin/piano
White Birds - women's choir a cappella
Dragonflies - flute trio
Sylvan - solo alto flute
In Memoria - choir a cappella
Trumpet Calls - trumpet fanfares

The songs in the Gospels collection, including Farther Down Mighty River and Lord I'm Free are now available as separate sheet music.

Critics at Swedish Dagens Nyheter and Norwegian Dagsavisen put Golden Slumbers on their best of 2009 lists. A blog post.

Mass has now been performed in 35 countries.

A fellow artist we like.

From Requiem

From My Rose

From When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom'd

From Zakuro

DIVERSE

A song story: Way back in a previous century, Radka Toneff and I were considering material that would eventually become the album Fairy Tales (Odin 1982). I remembered a beautiful Jim Webb tune Judy Collins had sung called The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and suggested it. Radka liked it and we recorded it (in one take, I believe). To give it an edge, I took the liberty of adding descending half-step key modulations between the verses. In '96 Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden used this modulated Fairy Tales version as their starting point when recording it on their Beyond The Missouri Sky CD. It has since become most people's favorite track on Fairy Tales. Last year I discovered the title "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" wasn't actually Jim Webb's invention - he'd affectionately borrowed it from a 1966 novel of the same name by speculative-fiction author Robert Heinlein. I owed it to the song to read the book - and now after many Heinlein novels I've found my favorite author.

Play-along flute books