Augusta Read Thomas’s music is nuanced, majestic, elegant, capricious, lyrical, and colorful — “it is boldly considered music that celebrates the sound of the instruments and reaffirms the vitality of orchestral music.” (Philadelphia Inquirer)

A Grammy winner, her impressive body of works embodies unbridled passion and fierce poetry. The New Yorker magazine called her “a true virtuoso composer.” Championed by such luminaries as Barenboim, Rostropovich, Boulez, Eschenbach, Salonen, Maazel, Ozawa, and Knussen, she rose early to the top of her profession.

An influential teacher at Eastman, Northwestern, Tanglewood, and Aspen Music Festival, she is only the 16th person to be designated University Professor at the University of Chicago (one of only seven currently holding the title). Augusta said, “Teaching is a natural extension of my creative process and of my enthusiasm for the music of others.”  She founded and leads the Center for Contemporary Composition at the University of Chicago.

Thomas was the longest-serving Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony, for Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez, from 1997 through 2006. This residency culminated in the premiere of Astral Canticle, one of two finalists for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Music. During her residency, Thomas not only premiered nine commissioned orchestral works, but was also the central force in establishing the thriving MusicNOW series, through which she commissioned and programmed the work of many living composers.

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Leslie Dunton-Downer has written extensively for composer Augusta Read Thomas. Their first work, Ligeia, premiered in Evian, France under the baton of Mstislav Rostropovich, and received the 1994 Orpheus Prize for Best Chamber Opera ahead of acclaimed productions in Italy and the U.S. Among other libretti is Belladonna, for a chamber opera by Pulitzer-winning composer Bernard Rands, to mark the 50^th anniversary of the Aspen Music Festival.

Leslie has in recent years teamed up with Berlin-based composers Farahnaz Hatam, Colin Hacklander, Marion Wörle, and Maciej Sledziecki. Following the success of This Is Not A Swan Song, which premiered in Cologne in 2017, Leslie, Marion, and Maciej are making additional music theater pieces, redrum and Forest, for forthcoming premieres at the Delphi Theater in Berlin, where cabaret scenes for the popular TV series Babylon Berlin are filmed.

A graduate of Harvard College, Leslie earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. She is a former Harvard University Lecturer, and a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her most recent book, The English is Coming!: How One Language is Sweeping the World (Touchstone, 2011), examines the global roots and reach of the English language. She also co-authored two books for publisher Dorling Kindersley: Essential Shakespeare Handbook (2004, 2013), and Opera (2006), each published in numerous foreign language editions.

Laura Kaminsky “makes the most of textures, sometimes delicate and almost weightless, sometimes thick and convoluted, but always vivid.” (Washington Post) “Full of fire as well as ice, contrasting dissonance and violence with tonal beauty and meditative reflection, (her music) is strong stuff.” (American Record Guide) As One (American Opera Projects/BAM), the most produced contemporary opera in the U.S., has played in Canada, Europe and Australia. Hometown to the World (Santa Fe Opera) premieres 2021; Finding Wright (Dayton Opera), 2022. Fantasy: Oppens Plays Kaminsky (Cedille Records, 2021) features pianist Ursula Oppens, Cassatt String Quartet, pianist Jerome Lowenthal, ASU Symphony Orchestra/Maestro Jeffery Meyer.

Scores: Bill Holab Music

Recordings: Affeto, Albany, Bridge, BSS, Cedille, CRI, Capstone, Mode, MSR, and Navona labels. A complete list of available recordings can be viewed at the Buy CDs page. Kaminsky is a BMI composer.

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Hometown to the World is librettist Kimberly Reed’s fourth opera. She co-wrote the libretti for Today It Rains (Opera Parallèle, 2019), Some Light Emerges (Houston Grand Opera, 2017), and As One (the American Opera Project, 2014), which is the most frequently produced new opera in North America, according to Opera America magazine. Her film projections have been called “worthy of Fellini or Bergman” (SF Classical Voice). Ms. Reed’ s song cycle Fierce Grace: Jeannette Rankin premiered at the U.S. Library of Congress in 2017. Her nonfiction writing was published in “The Moth,” a New York Times best-seller. Kim’s documentary film Prodigal Sons won 14 awards and was released in theaters and broadcast worldwide, and her Sundance award-winning 2018 documentary Dark Money was promptly named by Vogue magazine as one of the 66 Best Documentaries of All Time and shortlisted for the Academy Awards. She is a fellow of Yaddo and New York Foundation for the Arts.

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David Hanlon is a composer, conductor, and pianist praised by Maestro Patrick Summers as “one of the major compositional voices of the young generation.” David has written and conducted many works for Houston Grand Opera, including the premiere of his chamber opera After the Storm (with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann.) The Houston Chronicle lauded the score as “haunting” and “stirringly successful.” Other HGO works include his chamber opera Past the Checkpoints about undocumented immigrants, as well as the chamber vocal pieces The Ninth November I Was Hiding and Power.  His children’s opera Listen, Wilhelmina! returns to Wolf Trap Opera this summer, following its 2017 premiere. Other recent vocal works have included Texanische Liebeslieder written with Wilhelmina librettist Kathleen Kelly, based on the Texas-German dialect archives at UT-Austin, and Poems and Other Sentimental Bullshit for soprano Melody Moore’s Carnegie Hall debut.

David is also a conductor with a focus on new work, praised by the Washington Post for his interpretive skills and “precise baton.” This May,  David conducts Cruzar la cara de la luna in its return to HGO. He also led the work at its HGO premiere and recording, as well as its revivals at Lyric Chicago of Chicago, San Diego Opera, Arizona Opera, and New York City Opera. Next season he will conduct The Scarlet Ibis at Chicago Opera Theatre, and El Pasado Nunca Se Termina at Fort Worth Opera, a work whose world premiere he led at Lyric Opera of Chicago. David served as Lorin Maazel’s assistant conductor for the Castleton Festival, and has also assisted at San Francisco Opera, Dallas Opera, and Philadelphia Opera.

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Stephanie Fleischmann is a playwright and librettist whose texts serve as blueprints for intricate three-dimensional sonic and visual worlds. She has been called a “neo Emily Dickinson” (Backstage) and “a writer who can conjure something between a dreamy road movie and a theatrical coming-of-age tale, and who can piece these elements together in the style of a jagged ballad for guitar” (Chicago Sun Times). Her “lyrical monologues” (The New York Times),  “smart” opera libretti (Opera News), plays and music-theater works have been performed internationally and across the U.S.

Opera libretti include: The Long Walk, music by Jeremy Howard Beck, commissioned by American Lyric Theater, After the Storm, music by David Hanlon, commissioned by Houston Grand Opera’s HGOco, In a Grove, with composer Christopher Cerrone, Mahogany Opera Group Various Stages Festival, ICA London; The Property, music by Wlad Marhulets, commissioned by Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Lyric Unlimited.

Fleischmann is a recipient of a 2017 Venturous Capital Fund grant, a 2017 NYSCA Individual Artist Commission, a 2014–15 Howard Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting, a grant from Arts Council England (for Tally Ho/NYLon Projects), two NYSCA Individual Artist Commissions, an NEA Opera/Music-Theater commission, two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, and a Tennessee Williams Fellowship among others.

She received her MFA from Brooklyn College, where she studied with Mac Wellman. She has taught at Sewanee, Bard, and Skidmore Colleges. Her plays are published by: Play, a Journal of Plays; Playscripts.com; and Smith and Krauss.

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Chandler Carter’s operas have been variously described as a “compelling musical recounting” (Newsday); as conveying “an inborn feeling for the Southern setting, confidently employing elements of jazz, blues and gospel hymns” (Raleigh News and Observer).

Devoted to themes of social justice and the artist’s vision, Carter’s staged work focuses on historical stories that cross over boundaries of race and power. He wrote the words and music for No Easy Walk to Freedom, based on the life of Nelson Mandela, which premiered at The Riverside Church in New York City in 2001. Strange Fruit, based on the novel by Lillian Smith and libretto by Joan Ross Sorkin, was showcased in New York City Opera’s Vox series and opened Long Leaf Opera’s inaugural 2007 summer festival in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Long Leaf Opera also premiered his one-act monodrama Mercury Falling, written for tenor and librettist Daniel Neer, in Raleigh, North Carolina in 2009. The Center for Contemporary Opera showcased his most recent opera, Bobby, based on the life of Robert Kennedy with libretto by Stephen Molton in 2014.

Carter is Professor of Music and the head of composition at Hofstra University, where he produced and curated along with Diana Solomon-Glover, Hofstra’s annual Black History Month concerts from 2013-2016. Also a respected scholar, his forthcoming book, The Last Opera: The Progress of The Rake, Stravinsky and Sung Drama, will be published by Indiana University Press in 2019.

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To a growing list of accomplishments, Diana Solomon-Glover now adds the title of librettist. This Little Light of Mine, an opera about Civil Rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer, with music by Chandler Carter was commissioned by Opera for All Voices and is scheduled to debut at the Santa Fe Opera in October 2022. This achievement crowns a career spent serving humanitarian efforts and social causes through her work on the operatic stage, concert, oratorio, recital, musical theater, cabaret and radio and television across the United States, Canada, Europe, the Caribbean and Central America.

Solomon-Glover has been a featured soloist for The Innocence Project’s Annual Gala, which celebrates the emancipation of wrongly incarcerated Americans and producer of Project People Foundation’s “Celebration of Life” concerts, which raised over $250,000 for programs benefiting South African children orphaned by AIDS. Ms. Solomon-Glover is co-owner with singer/composer Kristin Norderval of Reduta Deux, a not-for-profit dedicated to producing theatrical works that represent an unusual integration of vision and techniques whose subject matter reflects a broad human consciousness.