Theater and Film
In addition to winning his second Tony Award for Best Score for Broadway’s “Titanic” (which won five Tonys including Best Musical), Yeston won a Tony Award and two Drama Desk Awards for his music and lyrics to Broadway’s “Nine” (based on Fellini’s “8 ½”). That production won four additional Tonys, including Best Musical. The Broadway revival of “Nine”, starring Antonio Banderas, won the Tony Award for Best Musical Revival. For all of the above he is a 3-time Grammy nominee. Yeston’s contribution to the score for Broadway’s “Grand Hotel” was nominated for a Tony and two Drama Desk Awards, and Michael Grandage’s Donmar Warehouse London production of this show won the Olivier Award.
His score for “Phantom” has received national and international acclaim and is currently in production across America, Europe and Asia. Yeston’s score to “Death Takes A Holiday”, with a Book by Peter Stone, appeared Off Broadway in 2011 –and was nominated for 11 Drama Desk Awards, including Best Score and Best Musical and cited by Time Magazine as among the top 10 plays and musicals of 2011. His hit new musical Revue “Anything Can Happen In The Theater” – The Musical World of Maury Yeston, conceived and directed by Gerard Alessandrini, premiered in March 2020 at Manhattan’s York Theater Company.
The film adaptation of “Nine (film)”, directed by Rob Marshall features Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Nicole Kidman, Dame Judi Dench, Kate Hudson, Fergie, and Sophia Loren, with a screenplay by Anthony Minghella and Michael Tolkin, and was nominated for 5 Golden Globes and 4 Academy Awards. Yeston was nominated for a Critics Choice and Golden Globe for Best Original Song (“Cinema Italiano”) and an Academy Award for Best Original Song (“Take It All”). He also appears in the Documentary films “Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy” and “Heart & Soul: The Life and Music of Frank Loesser”.
Concert
Yeston’s music and lyrics cover a wide variety of styles, from his Cello Concerto (premiered by Yo-Yo Ma) to the concept album “Goya—A Life In Song,” (featuring Placido Domingo and Gloria Estefan). The song “Till I Loved You,” from the “Goya” album became a Top 40 hit for Barbra Streisand. When commissioned by Carnegie Hall to write a series of songs commemorating their centennial celebration, Yeston created the modern classical crossover song cycle “December Songs”, inspired by Schubert’s masterpiece “Die Winterreise”. Commissioned by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to create a grand work for the Millennium, he composed and orchestrated “An American Cantata - 2000 Voices” – a choral symphony in three movements for the National Symphony Orchestra and 2000 singers, conducted by Leonard Slatkin and premiering on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in July of 2000. In addition he has written numerous Chamber works including a Piano Sonata, and works for String Quartet, voice and piano. For scores and materials go here: CONCORD THEATRICALS
Ballet
Yeston had the idea of writing a three-act story ballet in the grand European classical tradition, but one steeped in Americana based on an American subject. The result was “Tom Sawyer - A Ballet In Three Acts”, a symphonic work commissioned for the Kansas City Ballet to inaugurate Kansas City’s new Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. It was choreographed by William Whitener, with costumes by Holly Hynes, and Alastair Macaulay’s NY Times rave review declared the piece historic, writing “this is the first all-new, entirely American three-act ballet: it is based on an American literary classic, has an original score by an American composer and was given its premiere by an American choreographer and company”. (NY Times Review - Tom Sawyer Ballet) A 2-CD recording of the entire three-act, 1 hour 35 minute work, performed by The San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, was released by PS Classics in August 2013. For scores and materials go here: CONCORD THEATRICALS
Recordings and Incidental Music
Three times nominated for a Grammy Award, Yeston’s recordings include cast albums of Nine, Titanic, Phantom, Grand Hotel, Death Takes A Holiday, The Maury Yeston Songbook, Maury Sings Yeston, December Songs , seven times in English and once each in French, German, and Polish), Goya - A Life In Song, featuring Placido Domingo, Gloria Estefan, Dionne Warwick and Richie Havens, the Film Soundtrack of Nine, “If I Tell You” - Laura Osnes sings Songs of Maury Yeston”, “Tom Sawyer - A Ballet in Three Acts”, and the cast album of the musical revue “Anything Can Happen in The Theater” in addition to Barbra Streisand’s hit renditions of “Unusual Way” and “Till I Loved You”. Foreign language Cast Recordings include Nueve – Argentine Cast, Nine, de Musical –Dutch Cast, Nine – French Cast, and Nine (Brno) – Polish Cast, and Goya: Una Vida Hecha Canción – Spanish Cast. He also wrote the incidental music for both the Broadway 2009 hit revival of “The Royal Family”, directed by Doug Hughes, and for the legendary Off Broadway New York premiere of Caryl Churchill’s “Cloud 9”, directed by Tommy Tune, and December Songs for Voice and Orchestra with Victoria Clarke and a 37-piece Ensemble.
New and Recent Works
PS Classics has recorded the December Songs for Voice and Orchestra - accompanied for the first time by a Full Orchestra of 37 – performed by the brilliant Victoria Clark, with new orchestrations by Larry Hochman, released in September of 2022. PS Classics has also released another new album - “Maury Sings Yeston, The Demos” (a compendium of 40 personal demos of many of his works). He is currently also writing a new musical in the grand tradition based on the story of the building of The Brooklyn Bridge, and an original musical based on the life of the Japanese Haiku poet Kobayashi Issa, scheduled for production in Tokyo in 2026.
A two-week Workshop of the new “CLUB MOSCOW - How To Lose A Democracy” with Thom Southerland and Danielle Tarento was presented in London in July, 2022. “CLUB MOSCOW”, a new sung-through musical, takes a ride through the first decade of Post-Soviet Union Russia during the wild-west chaotic 1990’s – a kleptocracy of oligarchs, mafiosi, and corruption. Through the eyes of a street musician is revealed a roller coaster of a society careening off the rails, drunk on democracy and greed, and ultimately to be shut down by Putin to be transformed into the unfree dictatorship that it has come to be.
A Revue showcasing his work, conceived and directed by Gerard Alessandrini - “Anything Can Happen In The Theater - The Musical World of Maury Yeston” opened to great acclaim at the York Theater in New York in the Spring of 2020. The European premiere of the Small Ensemble “Titanic”, directed by Thom Sullivan and produced by Danielle Tarento, opened to rave reviews at the Southwark Playhouse in London, winning Broadwayworld UK’s Award for Best Regional Production of a Musical in the UK, Whatsonstage Best Regional Production of a Musical, and swept the Offie Awards in four categories including Best Musical Production. Southwark Playhouse matched this success in August 2015 with their well-received production of “Grand Hotel”, garnering Critic’s “top picks” from numerous UK publications.
Academia and Honors
Recently inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame, Yeston holds a PhD. and MPhil. from Yale University and BA and MA degrees from both Yale and Clare College, Cambridge Universities. He was Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music at Yale for eight years, twice cited by the undergraduates as being among Yale’s top ten professors and was Director of the BMI Music Theatre Advanced Workshop in New York City for twenty five years. As a musicologist he is the author of “The Stratification of Musical Rhythm” (recently republished in Chinese) – a seminal music theory text noted for its groundbreaking innovation in his original theory of rhythm and “Readings in Schenker Analysis” - a compendium of academic essays elucidating the study of tonality as conceived by the noted theorist Heinrich Schenker – both books published by Yale University Press, in addition to scholarly articles including “Rubato and The Middleground” published in The Journal of Music Theory.
He is a lifetime member of the Council of the Dramatists Guild, a founding member of the Society for Music Theory, and served on the Board of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, The Kleban Foundation and The Kurt Weill Foundation. He has also served on the editorial boards of Musical Quarterly and the advisory board of the Yale University Press Broadway Series. Yeston was a Kayden Visiting Artist at Harvard University in 1998, received The Elaine Kaufman Cultural Center Creative Arts Award in New York as Artist of The Year, and was The Encompass Opera’s Lifetime Achievement Honoree in 2009. He is an Ambassador of The Society of Composers and Lyricists, received the Emerson College Artist of Distinction Award, The Sheldon Harnick Award for Creative Excellence, and holds an Honorary Doctorate from Five Towns College and the Friends of Music Prize (Yale) for his Cello Concerto. Profoundly meaningful to him are the awards and accomplishments of his almost four decades of brilliant students. As Ned Rorem has pointed out, “Artists exult in their own self-discovery; teachers exult in the self-discovery of others.”
FULL LIST:
• Tony Award for Best Original Score (1982) (Nine)
• Tony Award for Best Musical (1982) (Nine)
• Tony Award for Best Musical Revival (2003) (Nine)
• Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music (1982,Nine)
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• Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lyrics (1982) (Nine)
• Nominee Tony Award for Best Original Score in (1990) (Grand Hotel)
• Nominee Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music (Grand Hotel)
• Nominee Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lyrics (Grand Hotel)
• Tony Award for Best Original Score (1997) (Titanic)
• Tony Award for Best Musical (1997) (Titanic)
• Nominee for Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album, 1983 (Nine)
• Nominee for Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album, 1998 (Titanic)
• Nominee for Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album, 2004 (Nine)
• Laurence Olivier Award 2005 (Grand Hotel)
• Nominee for Academy Award for Best Original Song – “Take It All” in 2010 (Nine)
• Nominee for Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song – “Cinema Italiano” in 2010 (Nine)
• Nominee for Broadcast Film Critics Award for Best Original Song – (“Cinema Italiano)
• Nominee for Satellite Award for Best Original Song – (“Cinema Italiano””)
• Nominee for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in 2012 (Death Takes a Holiday)
• Nominee for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lyrics in 2012 (Death Takes a Holiday)
• ACE Award -Association of Latin Entertainment Critics Argentine award – Mejor Musical for “Nueve”
• Ambassador of The Society of Composers and Lyricists
• Honorary Doctorate in Music, DMA Five Towns College 2004[
• Elaine Kaufman Cultural Center Creative Arts Award, 1998
• Kayden Visiting Artist, Harvard University
• Emerson College Leonidas A. Nicklole Artist of Distinction Award
. Encompass Opera Lifetime Achievement Honoree
• Sheldon Harnick Award For Creative Excellence
• Friends of Music Medal/Yale (Concerto for Cello and Orchestra)