Meyer Kupferman
American composer and virtuoso clarinettist Meyer Kupferman was born on 3 July 1926 in New York City.
The son of a Romanian gypsy folk singer, he studied violin and clarinet and went on to write a staggering number of works including twelve symphonies, seven operas and nine ballets. His music made use of jazz and twelve-tone techniques, and he wrote both for electronic and live instruments.
In a review of one of many CDs of Kupferman's orchestral music, Patric Standford referred to '... a sustained quality that is Kupferman's own, widely spread and generous, emotionally extrovert and, with familiarity, cleverly made'.
Meyer Kupferman died on 26 November 2003, aged seventy-seven, near Rhinebeck, New York.