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Kenneth A. Christensen
KENNETH A. CHRISTENSEN is a composer, author and music teacher from Crystal Lake, Illinois. He earned his degree in music education from Elmhurst College and served as a church soloist for St. John...view moreKENNETH A. CHRISTENSEN is a composer, author and music teacher from Crystal Lake, Illinois. He earned his degree in music education from Elmhurst College and served as a church soloist for St. John’s Lutheran Church in Algonquin and Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church in McHenry. Mr. Christensen, in addition to being an author, is the composer of five symphonies, concertos for piano, violin, cello, clarinet, harpsichord and viola, sonatas for piano, violin, cello, clarinet and organ, five symphonic poems, six string quartets and other chamber music. His major choral works include an oratorio ‘The Stranger from Galilee’, cantatas, four masses, a Requiem and Te Deum, a symphonic suite “The Tales of Edgar Allen Poe”, a song cycle “A Child’s Garden of Verses” on texts by Robert Louis Stevenson, extended operatic settings of “The Raven” and the Love Scene from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and also two piano suites ‘Twelve Metrological Etudes’ and The Signs of the Zodiac and has been contemplating a grand opera on a Midwestern American topic. Toscanini clearly showed two different sides to his personality. He had personal demons on one shoulder and a guardian angel on the other. His life was a confusing series of contradictions. He was far from perfect and he would beat himself up emotionally when he failed to be his absolute best during every single opera and performance. The victim of a frigid childhood blighted by an alcoholic and absent father, a cold-hearted mother and a music school which resembled a maximum security prison. Toscanini often hurt all the people closest to him, including his own children, because only through his own art, did he ever learn to love himself.
The Toscanini Mystique was completed on March 15th, 2014 at 5 p.m. in Crystal Lake, Illinois.view less