Jonathan Leshnoff is quickly winning an international reputation as one of America’s most gifted young composers. The New Jersey-born composer is riding the crest of a wave of popularity that has resulted in international performances of his works by the Philadelphia, Baltimore, IRIS, Buffalo, Kyoto, Curtis Institute, Kansas City, National Gallery of Art, Boca Raton, Columbus, Extremadura (Madrid) Orchestras, among others, and chamber music performances by the Da Capo Chamber Players and the Smithsonian’s Twenty-First Century Consort. The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts recently commissioned him for a full-length Oratorio, to be premiered by The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia under the baton of Roberto Minzcuk during the Kimmel Center’s inaugural International Arts Festival in 2011. During the same season, he will look forward to two other premieres: The Philadelphia Orchestra, under the direction of Charles Dutoit, will premiere his flute concerto written for Philadelphia Orchestra Principal Flutist, Jeffrey Khaner and a new orchestral work, Starburst, will be premiered by Marin Alsop and The Baltimore Symphony. He is currently the composer-in-residence with the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra.

The first of three recordings devoted exclusively to Leshnoff’s music was released on the Naxos “American Classics” label and selected among Naxos’s top 40 CDs for 2009. It includes his Violin Concerto, performed by violinist Charles Wetherbee and the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Markand Thakar, and his String Quartet No. 1, performed by the Carpe Diem String Quartet. Other Naxos releases feature his Symphony No. 1 conducted by Michael Stern and the IRIS Chamber Orchestra, and Leshnoff’s chamber music.

Named by the Baltimore Sun as an “Artist to Watch,” Jonathan Leshnoff’s music has been lauded by the Strings Magazine as “quite distinct from anything else that’s out there,” by the Memphis Commercial Appeal as “a fluid, thoughtful work, superbly textured and unafraid to be intellectual,” and by the Baltimore Sun as “remarkably assured, cohesively constructed and radiantly lyrical.” The New York Times declared in a November, 2008, review that “the afternoon’s keenest discovery was Mr. Leshnoff.”

Currently an Associate Professor of Music at Towson University in Maryland, he can be found running around local Baltimore playgrounds with his children.