Dorothy Young Riess, M.D., will celebrate her eighty-fifth birthday with a recital at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, in Doc Rando Hall, on May 20 at 7:30 p.m. Sponsored by the Southern Nevada Chapter of the American Guild of Organists, her program, “Come! Dance With Me!”, features classic dance forms by various composers including her arrangement for organ of three scenes from Igor Stravinsky’s Petrouchka. Dr. Riess has always been interested in dance, and studied tap, ballet, and modern (student of Yiechi Nimura in New York City). Sixty-four years ago at age twenty, she won the American Guild of Organists National Organ Competition (NYACOP) in San Francisco (1952), the second student of Mildred Andrews to do so (Bob Whitley won the first competition in 1950 in Boston).
After several years of travel in Europe and the United States, Dr. Riess served as organist and choirmaster of the American Church in Rome, Italy, where a visiting professor from Yale, after hearing her play the organ, offered her a scholarship. She studied organ with Frank Bozyan and composition with Pulitzer Prize winner Mel Powell. She performed her master’s recital at Woolsey Hall and was awarded the Jepson Prize for excellence. After a year at Yale, her father’s death from end-stage diabetes changed her life, and she put aside music to study medicine, graduating from the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine in 1969 at the age of 39. After thirty years practicing internal medicine in Pasadena, she retired to Las Vegas and resumed the organ, playing her 75th and 80th birthday celebration concerts at UNLV. Dorothy Young Riess maintains an active concert schedule and enjoys composing music using jazz idioms.
For information: www.sncago.org.
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