He received the $25,000 award from Wu Han, co-artistic director of the Society, at a ceremony on Tuesday (March 20) at Lincoln Center's Rose Studio. Jalbert was interviewed, and one of his works was performed by the Escher String Quartet. (The interview and performance were recorded for future broadcast on the WFMT Radio Network, according to the Society.)

Born in 1967, Jalbert is currently Associate Professor of Composition and Theory at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music in Houston. In 2001, he won the inaugural London Symphony/BBC Masterprize competition with his orchestral work In Aeternam; he has also received, among other honors, the Rome Prize (2000-01), the Bearns Prize in Composition from Columbia University (1992), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1995). His most recent large-scale works are Fire and Ice, premiered last month by the Oakland East Bay Symphony of California and commissioned under Meet the Composer's MAGNUM OPUS project, and big sky, commissioned by the Houston Symphony and premiered in 2006.

The Stoeger Prize, the largest in its field, is given every two years by the Chamber Music Society "in recognition of significant contributions to the chamber music repertory." Among previous winners have been Osvaldo Golijov (1996), Oliver Knussen (1990), Thomas Ads (1998), Kaija Saariaho (2000), Aaron Jay Kernis (1993), Judith Weir (1997), and Chen Yi (2002).