Miguel del Águila

Miguel del Águila (born September 15, 1957, in Montevideo) is an Uruguayan American composer of classical music. He has been nominated for the Grammy Awards three times and has received many other honors. Life In 1978, he moved to California, fleeing Uruguay’s 1970s military government. He graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and studied at the Hochschule für Musik and Konservatorium in Vienna. Early premieres of his works in Vienna’s Musikverein, Konzerthaus and Bösendorfer halls introduced his music and distinctive Latin sound to European audiences. In 1989, del Águila’s work was performed in New York’s Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Hall), and Lukas Foss conducted the US premiere of Hexen with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. CDs of his works were released on Albany Records and KKM-Austria by 1990, including his Clarinet Concerto, Herbsttag and Hexen. He returned to the US in 1992, and in 1998 the Los Angeles Times described him as “one of the West Coast’s most promising and enterprising young composers.” He received the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award in 1995, and was music director of Ojai Camerata until 1999. He was resident composer at the Chautauqua Institution