His music has been performed and broadcast by major orchestras, chamber ensembles, and festivals throughout North and South America, Europe, and Japan. Tsontakis was honored with the "Academy Award" in 1995 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was the fourth recipient of the Ives Living Fellowship, in 2007. Pianist
Stephen Hough's recording of Tsontakis's "Ghost Variations" on Hyperion Records was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, and was the only classical recording among
Time magazine's 1998 Top Ten Recordings. Tsontakis received the
Berlin Prize from the
American Academy in Berlin in 2002, and the
University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for his Violin Concerto No. 2 in 2005. A proficient conductor of orchestral and choral music, Tsontakis has been a composer-in-residence with the Aspen Music Festival and conductor and the founding director of the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble at the
Aspen Music School, where he teaches composition. He was an assistant professor at the
Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music, and has served on the faculty of
Sarah Lawrence College. He is Distinguished Faculty, Composer-in-Residence of the
Bard College Conservatory of Music in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He was a Weil fellow at
Auburn University Montgomery. Tsontakis's music has been recorded by Hyperion, Koch, Innova, and Naxos. In 2008, his Violin Concerto No. 2, recorded by violinist Steven Copes and the SPCO, was nominated for a
Grammy in the category of Best Classical Contemporary Composition, but lost to
John Corigliano's Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan. He is Distinguished Composer-in-Residence at the Bard College Conservatory. ==References==