Eric Sawyer, composer

The music of Eric Sawyer receives frequent performances on both coasts, including at New York’s Weill and Merkin concert halls and at Tanglewood, as well as in England, France, Germany, and recently in Romania and Bulgaria. Recent performances include works on programs by the San Jose Chamber Orchestra, Brentano String Quartet, Seraphim Singers, Ensemble Phoenix, Radius Ensemble, Laurel Trio, Now and Then Chamber Players, Aurelius Ensemble, Opera Longy, Ives Quartet, Arden Quartet, Lighthouse Chamber Players, Earplay, and Empyrean. His opera Our American Cousin was staged in 2008 featuring the Boston Modern Opera Project.

Mr. Sawyer has received the Joseph Bearns Prize, a First Music commission from the New York Youth Symphony, and awards from the Tanglewood Music Center and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has held fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Harvard University. He appears frequently as a solo and chamber pianist, recently on programs by Empyrean, Lighthouse Chamber Players, and Composers in Red Sneakers, and is founding director of the critically acclaimed contemporary ensemble Longitude. He recently received a commission from the Ravinia Festival.

Following four years as Chair of Composition and Theory at the Longy School of Music, Mr. Sawyer joined the composition faculty of Amherst College in the fall of 2002. Previously, he has taught composition and theory at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Wellesley College, and MIT. Mr. Sawyer received his undergraduate musical training at Harvard College, and completed his graduate studies at Columbia University and the University of California, Davis. His teachers have included Leon Kirchner, Ross Bauer, Tison Street, Andrew Imbrie, Thomas Benjamin, and George Edwards for composition, and Victor Rosenbaum and Tatiana Yampolsky for pianoa

Gil Rose, Music Director

Gil Rose is recognized as one of a new generation of American conductors shaping the future of classical music. His orchestral and operatic performances and recordings have been recognized by critics and fans alike. In 1996, Gil Rose founded the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), one of the few professional orchestras in the country dedicated exclusively to performing music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Under his leadership, BMOP’s unique programming and high performance standards have attracted critical acclaim and earned the ensemble seven ASCAP awards for adventurous programming. Since 2003, Mr. Rose has also served as Music Director of Opera Boston, an innovative opera company in residence at the historic Cutler Majestic Theatre. Opera Boston has been named “Best in Boston” by The Boston Globe for seven consecutive years.

As a guest conductor, Mr. Rose made his Tanglewood Festival debut in 2002 conducting Lukas Foss’ opera Griffelkin, a work he recorded for Chandos and released in 2003 to rave reviews. Last year he made his guest debut with the Netherlands Radio Symphony conducting three world premieres as part of the Holland Festival. He has led the American Composers Orchestra, the West Bohemian Symphony Orchestra in the Czech Republic, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra of the Ukraine and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, as well as recent appearances with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players including a performance with this renowned ensemble at the Seiji Ozawa Hall 10th Anniversary Concert.

In June 2003, BMOP and Opera Boston together launched the much-celebrated Opera Unlimited, a ten-day contemporary opera festival featuring five operas and three world premieres. Mr. Rose led the world premiere of Elena Ruehr’s Toussaint Before the Spirits, the New England premiere of Thomas Ades’ Powder Her Face, as well as the revival of John Harbison’s A Full Moon in March with “skilled and committed direction” according to The Boston Globe.

Also recognized for interpreting standard operatic repertoire, Mr. Rose’s production of Verdi’s Luisa Miller was hailed as an important operatic event. The Boston Phoenix said “Gil Rose proved himself a superb Verdian, thinking out both the subtle details of small phrases and the sweep of entire scenes.” The Boston Globe recognized the production as “the best Verdi production presented in Boston in the last 15 years.” Mr. Rose’s recording of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa for Naxos (the first recording since the premiere) has been hailed as an important achievement by the international press. He was chosen as the “Best Conductor of 2003” by Opera Online.

Mr. Rose received his undergraduate training at the Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music. His Master of Fine Arts degree and Artist Diploma are from Carnegie Mellon University, where his teachers were Samuel Jones, Juan Pablo Izquierdo and Robert Page.

Carole Charnow, Stage Director

Carole Charnow received her BA from Emerson College and her MA in stage directing from London University. For fifteen years she worked as a professional director, singer, and Equity TV, film, and stage actress in London, England. As joint artistic director of Moving Target Theatre Company, she produced five UK premieres, including Rebel in Paradise by Howard Zinn. The company’s original commission of Olwen Wymark’s Brezhnev’s Children, published by Samuel French, was performed at the Young Vic Theatre in London and the Edinburgh Festival. Ms. Charnow returned to Boston in 1996 to take up her position at Opera Boston, and has presided over a period of unprecedented growth and artistic achievement. She has produced over forty operas to date, twelve of which were named amongst the “Best Opera in Boston” by The Boston Globe. Carole produced H.M.S. Pinafore on the USS Constitution, and South Pacific on the USS Cassin Young, two signature free events, which attracted over 20,000 audience members. As co-director of Opera Unlimited, she has produced several acclaimed American and regional premieres including John Adams’ Nixon In China, Thomas Adès’ Powder Her Face, and Peter Eötvös’ Angels in America.

John Shoptaw, librettist

John Shoptaw was raised in the Missouri Bootheel, the state’s poverty belt, where his first jobs included picking cotton and stacking lumber in the local mill. He began college at Southeast Missouri State Teachers’ College, and graduated from the University of Missouri at Columbia, with a degree in physics. He returned as a special student, and received undergraduate degrees in English and Comparative Literature. Upon graduating, he won the University award in Greek and Latin language.

Shoptaw attended graduate school at Harvard University, winning there a Merit and a Whiting Fellowship. He received his PhD from Harvard in English and American Literature. His dissertation, on the poetry of John Ashbery, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry, was rewritten and published by Harvard University Press.

After graduating from Harvard, he taught in the English Department at Princeton University, where he received a Mellon Preceptorship, and at Yale University, before he transferred with his wife (a professor in Classics at Yale) and daughter to the English Department of the University of California, Berkeley, where he now teaches American poetry and poetry writing. Since his study on Ashbery, he has published articles in the lyric theory (e.g., “Lyric Cryptography”, Poetics Today) and on American poetry (e.g., “Listening to Dickinson,” Representations).

Since joining the UC Berkeley English Department, Shoptaw has shifted his primary focus to creative writing, the first result of which is his libretto for Our American Cousin. He is currently finishing his first book of poems, Navigator, a sequence dwelling on the Mississippi River basin, where Shoptaw was born and raised. Some of these poems have been published in journals such as The Chicago Review and New American Writing.

He also recently collaborated with Sawyer on a setting of “Itasca,” a poem from Navigator,recounting the discovery of the source of the Mississippi River, for four choreographed singers and electronics. It premiered at the Center for New Music and Audio Technology at UC Berkeley and was performed at Amherst College in October 2006.

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