Sean Hickey is an American
composer and record label executive, born in 1970 in
Detroit, Michigan, and currently based in New York. In 2022, he was appointed Managing Director of
Pentatone.
His first commercial recording, Left at the Fork in the Road, was released in November 2005 on
Naxos American Classics. Featuring a selection of his
chamber and orchestral works, the album broke the
Billboard Top 100 Classical Chart[2] and was praised as "substantive and savvy" by the magazine Gramophone.[3]
In May 2013, an album of Hickey's clarinet and cello concertos was released on
Delos.[4] The album features cellist Dmitry Kouzov and clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein, along with the Saint Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Lande. The record was subsequently reviewed by NewMusicBox, which called the clarinet concerto "a formidable work".[5]
Hickey's album Cursive was released in May 2014 on Delos,[6] and is a retrospective of much of the composer's work for piano and chamber music combinations. Performing on the album are pianist
Philip Edward Fisher, violinist
Julia Sakharova, flutist Brandon Patrick George, violist
Anne Lanzilotti, and harpist Meredith Clark. A further recording, by Greek guitarist Smaro Gregoriadou, was released on Delos in 2016, and features the second recording of his "Tango Grotesco", for solo guitar.
2017 saw the release of A Pacifying Weapon, a concerto for
recorder and orchestra commissioned by recorder virtuoso
Michala Petri, and premiered by the Royal Danish Conservatory Orchestra led by Jean Thorel. The premiere and recording took place in September 2016 in Copenhagen, released in 2017 on Our Recordings, and again in 2019, also on Our, as "American Recorder Concertos". He has seen three other recordings of his works in 2019. 2024 has seen the recording of his most ambitious work inspired by the Yuval Noah Harari book of the same name: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, for piano.
Hickey is also a published poet[7] and writer of music reviews and travelogues. He is an
ASCAP member and is published by Cantabile Press. In addition, he was the Senior Vice-president, Sales and Business development, for Naxos of America,[8] and speaks regularly at colleges, conservatories and universities throughout the world on his compositional and creative work, as well new media and musician entrepreneurship. In April 2022
Pentatone appointed Hickey as managing director.[8]
Works
Chamber
Ampersand (2006) violin, piano
Avatar (2005) violin, clarinet, piano
Barri Gotic (2013) flute, guitar
Concerto for Clarinet and String Quartet (2006) B-flat clarint, 2 violins, viola, cello