Douglas Knehans
InterContinental Music Awards Winner
2024 – Best of Pangea | Classical
Douglas Knehans, composer
Ten-time American Prize winner Douglas Knehans (b. 1957) has received awards from the American Music Center, the NEA, the Australia Council Performing Arts Board, Yale University, the MacDowell Colony, Opera Australia, The Cannes Film Festival, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, The National Symphony Orchestra, The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Meet the Composer, and a host of others.
His music has been praised by The Washington Post as “beautiful” and that “tells an exciting story;” by The New Yorker, saying “the sounds of nature course through the orchestral pieces … with a primitive force and melodic insistence that recall Stravinsky.”, by The Australian as “brilliantly catchy and eerily bright;” and by Fanfare Magazine as “… astonishingly visceral … and hauntingly beautiful.”
A fellow of Carnegie Hall, the Victorian Council of the Arts, MacDowell Colony and Leighton Artist Colony (Banff), Knehans has been a guest of the Czech-American Summer Music Institute in Prague, Czech Republic; the New Music, New Faces Festival in Krakow, Poland; Premieres of the Season Festival in Kyiv, Ukraine, and a number of others.
A noted composer of opera, vocal and choral music, Knehans’ one hour operatic monodrama Backwards from Winter was premiered at the New York Opera Fest by the Center for Contemporary Opera and one month later was featured in a different production in a season of performances that led Fanfare Magazine critic Colin Clarke to claim it “An astonishingly visceral Winterreise for the 21st century,” and “This is what contemporary opera should be like.”
With an exceptional orchestral craft Knehans is known for his four symphonies and twelve concerti which have been played and recorded by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, The Kyiv Philharmonic, Brno Philharmonic, Royal Scottish National Orchestra and others in Australia, Europe and the USA. His orchestral compositions have earned him numerous international recording awards and in 2023 he was inducted into the AKADEMIA Awards Hall of Fame. Knehans was named Composer of the Year 2013 by the Ohio Music Teachers Association and was a 2011 winner of the International Music Prize for Excellence in Music Composition (Athens, Greece). He has been a member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and a voting member of the Grammy Awards since 2010.
Knehans’ music is available on ERM Media, Crystal Records, Move Records, New World Records, Naxos Records, and ABLAZE Records labels. His work is published by Donemus Publishers, Netherlands.