On my seventh birthday, in inner-suburban New Jersey, I was presented with my aunt’s upright player piano and was soon provided by a loving parent with weekly lessons. Almost immediately I began filling music notebooks with ideas.

A stroke of fate in the form of conductor Laszlo Halasz saved me from a life in a science laboratory when he awarded me his personal scholarship to attend the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. There my teachers included Konrad Wolff for piano, Maestro Halasz for orchestral conducting, Stefans Grové for harmony and counterpoint, Earle Brown for composition and Berl Senofsky for chamber music. At graduation I was awarded the Frances Wentz Turner Memorial Prize in Piano.

After completing a master’s degree at Peabody I moved to Washington, D.C., playing auxiliary keyboard parts with the National Symphony Orchestra under Antal Dorati and chamber music with members of the orchestra. Four of my earliest choral works, including two commissions, had their first performances by the Washington National Cathedral Choir.

Intense curiosity about England caused me to move there and I stayed for nine years. I sang with the cathedral choirs of Lichfield, Canterbury and St.Paul’s, London, played concertos of Beethoven
and Ravel with the Canterbury Festival Orchestra and recitals in London, the Midlands and the home counties. I composed twenty works for Canterbury Cathedral, most of them published by Oxford University Press and the Royal School of Church Music. Several of them are now staples of the Anglican choral repertoire and receive regular broadcast performances on the BBC. I studied collaborative piano performance at the Britten-Pears School at Snape and at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. I was a member of the Academy Chorus of St. Martin-in-the-Fields on several European tours and on the music track of the film Amadeus, and played harpsichord continuo in Handel’s "Messiah" with that orchestra.

On returning to the states I accompanied the lessons of storied voice teachers and was assistant conductor with the opera companies in Portland (Ore.), Wolf Trap and New Orleans.  For twenty years I served as assistant chorus master, stage band conductor and children's chorus director with the New York City Opera.  In 2009 I joined the staff of the Metropolitan Opera as Children's Chorus Director.  In that capacity I work with conductors such as James Levine (Tannhäuser, Wozzeck), Riccardo Muti (Attila), Simon Rattle (Pelléas et Mélisande), Yannick Nézet-Séguin (Carmen, Otello) and Valery Gergiev (Boris Godunov).

I have been privileged with commissions to write for, among others, the Atlantic Three Choirs Festival, Bath Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral, the Oakham School, the Harrow School, the period-instrument group "Parthenia", the Southampton Chamber Music Festival, and the Fairfield Orchestra.  While I continue to compose in the choral medium, my attention has turned more to instrumental works. These include commissioned virtuosic essays for cello and for flute, as well as a full-scale symphony with children’s chorus, commissioned by the Fairfield Orchestra and premiered in Carnegie Hall.

In June and July of 2011 I visited the Czech Republic for recordings of some of my compositions.  In March 2013 Navona Records released a compact disc from these sessions, including the symphony and four of my chamber works. Visit www.navonarecords.com/catalog/nv5904 for a full description of that release, "Imaginary Symphony and Other Tales".


 
 
 
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