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Now that you’ve read my "official" artist bio, let me just tell you about me. 2022/23 was a beautiful season. I conducted the farewell performances of the great Simon Estes at Des Moines Metro Opera.  After all the years of international renown, this legend is still a kind and gracious man.  If you see him about town, don’t let the cane fool you.  Dr. Estes is one feisty fellow.

 

I’m in a flurry of new music at the moment, including two world premieres at the Brandenburger Biennale and three new operas by female composers. First, Omar by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels. It was unforgettable being Rhiannon’s dancing partner when she kicked off her shoes and showed the whole rehearsal room what the South Carolina ground feels like under your feet. The day after we closed at Boston Lyric Opera, Omar won the Pulitzer Prize. We grew wings.

 

The second opera was She Who Dared by Jasmine Barnes and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, which I workshopped at American Lyric Theater in New York City. It tells the story of the brave women who paved the way for Rosa Parks. Spending every day in a rehearsal room with nine extraordinary women of color was like a taste of heaven.  If only I could bottle their energy and take it with me everywhere.

 

The third opera is Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson’s BLUE at New Orleans Opera. Jeanine is one of my heros, and Tazewell and I had a blast putting Porgy and Bess on stage in Des Moines. It has been quite some time since my last visit to New Orleans. I know I will be both inspired and heartbroken by how the city’s changed.

 

This fall, I also head to the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra (WSO) in West Virginia, where Austrian-Jewish composer Walter Bricht (1904–1970) lived in exile when he fled the Nazis in 1938. His Second Piano Concerto, stricken from the German and Austrian concert programs where his music had long been so beloved, has been hiding in a Viennese archive for nearly a hundred years. Together with pianist Dominic Cheli and the WSO performing on the Violins of Hope, I will conduct the world premiere of this exquisite concerto on October 19, 2023. I cannot wait to awaken this sleeping beauty from her slumber.

 

I return to Germany for the FKP Scorpio production of Aida, which will launch at Barclays Arena in Hamburg on February 2, 2024 and then go on tour to Berlin, Munich, and other cities. This production is sensuous and colossal, and we look forward to welcoming an audience of long-time opera-goers and first-timers alike.

 

A secret dream of mine comes true in summer 2024. I will be stage directing the Fritz-Reuter-Bühne (FRB) production of my play Erwin und Elmire, loosely based on Goethe’s Singspiel of the same name. After spending more hours of my life on a rehearsal stage than anywhere else, I am eager to apply all I’ve learned there from directors of every stripe rehearsing every kind of repertoire under the sun.  As it turns out, my very first project in Schwerin was with FRB, and it delights me to finish my time here with those same wonderful artists.

 

Yet another dream comes true in October of 2024.  A German opera house has commissioned me to compose a new piece of musical theater together with two composer-lyricist colleagues.  Locking ourselves away in a writers’ room to forge ideas together has been one of the highlights of my career.  Stay tuned for details…

 

Forgive me—I’ve buried the lead! Starting in the 2024/25 season, I will become Chief Conductor of the Staatsoperette Dresden. The story of this house, which began in the rubble of World War II, moved out to the fringes of the city, and finally returned to a magnificently restored theater in the heart of Dresden in 2016, captures my imagination. The Staatsoperette came calling last fall, quite unexpectedly. I met Intendantin Kathrin Kondaurow and was intrigued. I conducted the orchestra, which I had admired from afar for over a decade, and was thrilled. I conducted a performance in their new hall at Kraftwerk Mitte and was already starting to fall in love. During my days at the helm of the Workshop Orchestra of the Hochschule für Musik “Carl Maria von Weber” Dresden, I came to know the rich culture and natural beauty of the city lovingly nicknamed “Florence on the River Elbe.” I cannot wait to live there!

 

Speaking of the Hochschule, teaching has been wonderful these past years—in Hamburg, Leipzig, Boston, Washington DC. I hit my personal record during my eight summers at The Salzburg Institute of Religion, Culture & the Arts where I gave up to 25 lectures each summer, some in English and some in German, in just four weeks’ time. My mind was on fire.

 

But let me take a step back. Before I went freelance I spent ten seasons as Kapellmeister with Theater Nordhausen/Loh-Orchester Sondershausen and at the Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater Schwerin. The years were full. I inhaled standard repertoire: Rigoletto, The Flying Dutchman, Hansel and Gretel, Nutcracker, and the like. I helped create new work, including Jutta Ebnother’s ballets Shakespeare and The Creation. The latter particularly captured my imagination. I conducted from the fortepiano with the orchestra in the pit, the chorus was divided up in the side galleries on two levels, and the three vocal soloists were on stage in costume with the ballet company, sometimes even lifting and being lifted by the dancers while they sang. It was spectacular. “And there was light…”

 

I also composed a great deal of songs and incidental music for the three spoken theater companies in Schwerin. I loved contributing to The Crucible, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Pelle the Conqueror, and many other stage dramas. For the FRB, I even recomposed Mozart’s first opera Bastien et Bastienne, casting it through a prism of styles that surely would have fascinated the then 12-year-old Wunderkind: klezmer, tango, ragtime, gospel, blues. Wolfgang, meet boogie-woogie; it’s like Alberti bass, only better. Incidentally, this opera was originally produced in the private gardens of Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer, a family friend of the Mozarts who became infamous throughout Europe for his séance-like magnetic therapy sessions. The blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk. Despina parodies Mesmer in the Act I Finale of Così fan tutte. And if you have ever been “mesmer-ized,” then you know this man as well.

 

That’s my music-making. When I’m not busy with music, I sit by the lake. I walk in the woods. I wander through libraries and museums and archives. I fold origami. I read Schiller and Kafka and Kleist in the windowsill. I watch a spider repair her web night for night, no matter how many times the rain tears it down. I let my mind wander in the netherworld between dreaming and wakefulness. I listen to languages I don’t quite understand. I ponder maths and astrophysics and try to thread my mind through the needle’s eye of quantum theory…and fail, and try again, each time with slightly better questions. I watch people. I try to be kind. And I savor the silence that holds the sound.

 

September 16, 2023