french horn
Lecturer in French Horn and Director of the Collection of Musical Instruments. A native of Western Pennsylvania, William Purvis pursues a multifaceted career both in the U.S. and abroad as horn soloist, chamber musician, conductor, and educator. A passionate advocate of new music, Mr. Purvis has participated in numerous premieres as hornist and conductor, including horn concerti by Peter Lieberson, Bayan Northcott, and Krzysztof Penderecki (New York premiere); trios for violin, horn, and piano by Poul Ruders and Paul Lansky; and Steven Stucky’s Sonate en Forme de Préludes with Emanuel Ax in Carnegie Hall. Recent world premieres include Eliot Carter’s Retracing II for solo horn and Nine for Five, Carter’s new wind quintet, with the New York Woodwind Quintet.
Mr. Purvis is a member of the New York Woodwind Quintet, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the Yale Brass Trio, and the Triton Horn Trio, and is an emeritus member of Orpheus. A frequent guest artist with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, he has also collaborated with the Tokyo, Juilliard, Orion, Brentano, Mendelssohn, Sibelius, Daedalus, and Fine Arts string quartets.
His recordings span an unusually broad range from original instrument performance to standard solo and chamber music repertoire to contemporary solo and chamber music works, as well as numerous recordings of contemporary music as conductor. Recent recordings include the Horn Concerto of Peter Lieberson on Bridge (Grammy Award, WQXR Gramophone Award); works of Schumann, Paul Lansky, the Schoenberg Wind Quintet with the New York Woodwind Quintet; the Quintet for Horn and Strings by Richard Wernick with the Juilliard Quartet; and Retracing II for solo horn by Elliott Carter. In recent seasons he performed the Knussen Horn Concerto in Europe and the Penderecki Horn Concerto at Yale and Carnegie Hall, both under the batons of the respective composers. Most recently he recorded the quintets for piano and winds of Mozart and Beethoven on historical instruments with the Smithsonian Players. Since 1999, Mr. Purvis has been a faculty member at the Yale School of Music, where he is also the coordinator of winds and brass and the director of the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments.