Crossing

Matthew Aucoin is an American composer, conductor, writer, and pianist. He is the newly-appointed Artist-in-Residence at Los Angeles Opera. This position fuses his work as composer and conductor, from conducting the LA premiere of Philip Glass's Akhnaten, to composing a new full-length work which will premiere in a future season, to serving as the company's advisor on new music and working regularly with members of its opera studio.

In the 2014-15 season, Aucoin conducted the premieres of two of his operas: Crossing, at Boston's American Repertory Theater (directed by Diane Paulus); and Second Nature, a chamber opera for the young, at Lyric Opera of Chicago. He is currently at work on a new opera for the Metropolitan Opera / Lincoln Center Theater's New Works program.

In October 2016, pianist Conor Hanick and the Alabama Symphony gave the first performances of Aucoin's first piano concerto, commissioned by The Gilmore Foundation. Last season, his song cycle Merrill Songs was premiered by tenor Paul Appleby at Carnegie Hall. Violinist Jennifer Koh commissioned and debuted Aucoin's new solo violin work resolve for the New York Philharmonic Biennale and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.

Aucoin has recently made orchestral conducting debuts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; the Rome Opera Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago (a special event featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma); opera productions have included Music Academy of the West (The Bartered Bride, as well as his own chamber opera Second Nature); Teatro Petruzzelli in Bari, Italy (Le Nozze di Figaro) and Juilliard Opera (Eugene Onegin). 

Aucoin is a 2012 graduate of Harvard College, where he studied with the poet Jorie Graham; and a 2013 recipient of a graduate diploma in composition from The Juilliard School, where he studied with composer Robert Beaser. Shortly before he graduated from Harvard, Aucoin was hired as the youngest Assistant Conductor in the history of the Metropolitan Opera, where he worked with Thomas Adès, James Levine, and Valery Gergiev.

Aucoin remains an active pianist and regularly collaborates with violinist Keir GoGwilt, as well as many of the world's leading opera singers, including Renée Fleming, Paulo Szot, Rod Gilfry, and Anthony Roth Costanzo. An accomplished writer, Aucoin's essays and poetry have appeared in The Yale Review, The Colorado Review, The Boston Globe, and The Harvard Advocate. He has served as guest lecturer for the New York Shakespeare Society and a guest host for New York's WQXR. 

A.R.T.: Witness Uganda. Broadway/ West End: The Testament of Mary (Fiona Shaw); All My Sons (John Lithgow & Dianne Wiest); Top Girls, MTC; Cyrano de Bergerac (Kevin Kline); The Glass Menagerie (Jessica Lange); Fiddler on the Roof (Tony nomination); Medea (Fiona Shaw); Sinatra. Other design credits: The Death of Klinghoffer, Eugene Onegin, Met Opera; Così fan tutte, Met Opera/ENO; Thebans, ENO; High Society, Old Vic; John Gabriel Borkman, BAM; The Low Road, NSFW, Royal Court; Miss Fortune, Bregenz, Royal Opera; Death in Venice, La Scala (Premio Franco Abbiati della Critica Musicale Italiana); The Cunning Little Vixen, Glyndebourne.

A.R.T.: Ajax, Island of Slaves, Orpheus X, Olly’s Prison, Highway Ulysses. Broadway: Fun Home (Tony nomination, Best Scenic Design), Airline Highway (Tony nomination, Best Costume Design), Last Ship, Rocky, In The Next Room (Tony nomination, Best Costume Design), Xanadu. Off-Broadway: The Flick, Circle Mirror Transformation, Choir Boy, Dogfight. Regional: Guthrie Theater, Berkeley Rep, Mark Taper Forum, Yale Rep, La Jolla Playhouse, Steppenwolf. Opera: Lyric Opera Chicago, Santa Fe Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Washington National Opera.

A.R.T.: The Birthday Party, The King Stag, Endgame. Broadway: The Testament of Mary, Broadway/The Barbican. Recent work: La Traviata, Teatro Real; Shostakovich Trilogy, American Ballet Theater/San Francisco Ballet; Richard Nelson’s Apple Family Plays, New York Shakespeare Festival. Ms. Tipton teaches lighting at the Yale School of Drama. She received the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 2001, the Jerome Robbins Prize in 2003, and in April 2004 the Mayor’s Award for Arts and Culture in New York City. In 2008 she was made a United States Artists “Gracie” Fellow and a MacArthur Fellow.

A.R.T.: Crossing. Broadway: American Psycho, Almeida, West End; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, West End; Betrayal. London: Frankenstein, Royal Ballet; The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Royal Opera House; Chimerica, Almeida; Closer, Donmar Warehouse; Master and Margarita, All My Sons, Shunkin, Complicite; Top Girls, West End. Opera: The Feeling of Going, Skånes Dansteater and Malmö Opera; Death of Klinghoffer, Death in Venice, Onegin, Simon Boccanegra, The Damnation of Faust, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, ENO; Hansel and Gretel, A Dog’s Heart, The Magic Flute, Netherlands Opera; La clemenza di Tito, Mr Brouček, Opera North; Theatre an der Wien; Imago; Glyndebourne; RNT; Scottish Opera; LA Phil; Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Schauspielhaus, Köln; Traverse; Gothenburg Opera; Bregenz. Ross has won two Olivier Awards, a Tony, and a Drama Desk Award. Training: Central School of Speech and Drama.

A.R.T.: The Light Princess (A.R.T. and New Victory Theater), The Snow Queen, Hansel and Gretel. Recent work: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Production Manager); Santa Fe Opera Company (Titles Administrator); Brown University/ Trinity Rep (Sound Design Artist in Residence); OBERON (Head of Sound). Aaron is currently the Associate Director of Production at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, a new venue and organization on Bleecker Street in NoHo.

A.R.T.: Death and the Powers: The Robots' Opera (Associate Director). Opera: Productions at Chicago Opera Theater, Boston Lyric Opera, Guerilla Opera, Dallas Opera, Opera Omaha, Gotham Chamber Opera. Training programs include Glimmerglass Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Wolf Trap Opera. Education: B.A., Yale University. M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University. Eggert is currently Head of Opera at the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University.

A.R.T.: Debut. Performances with the Utah Symphony, Stony Brook Symphony, Windscape, Fry Street Quartet. Recitals at Carnegie Hall, Steinway Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Aspen Festival. Faculty: Juilliard Vocal Arts. Staff: Aspen Opera Theater, Heifetz Institute, Ravinia Steans Institute, Opera on the Avalon. D.M.A., University of Stony Brook. M.M., The Juilliard School.

ART: Crossing, Witness Uganda, Death and the Powers: The Robots' Opera, Sleep No More, Let Me Down Easy. International: Death and the Powers: The Robots’ Opera. Off-Broadway: Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, McKittrick Hotel; Invisible Thread, Second Stage. Many productions at Williamstown Theater Festival, Boston Ballet, Huntington Theater, Hangar Theater. BFA in Stage Management from Boston University College of Fine Arts.

Matthew Aucoin is an American composer, conductor, writer, and pianist. He is the newly-appointed Artist-in-Residence at Los Angeles Opera. This position fuses his work as composer and conductor, from conducting the LA premiere of Philip Glass's Akhnaten, to composing a new full-length work which will premiere in a future season, to serving as the company's advisor on new music and working regularly with members of its opera studio.

In the 2014-15 season, Aucoin conducted the premieres of two of his operas: Crossing, at Boston's American Repertory Theater (directed by Diane Paulus); and Second Nature, a chamber opera for the young, at Lyric Opera of Chicago. He is currently at work on a new opera for the Metropolitan Opera / Lincoln Center Theater's New Works program.

In October 2016, pianist Conor Hanick and the Alabama Symphony gave the first performances of Aucoin's first piano concerto, commissioned by The Gilmore Foundation. Last season, his song cycle Merrill Songs was premiered by tenor Paul Appleby at Carnegie Hall. Violinist Jennifer Koh commissioned and debuted Aucoin's new solo violin work resolve for the New York Philharmonic Biennale and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.

Aucoin has recently made orchestral conducting debuts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; the Rome Opera Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Civic Orchestra of Chicago (a special event featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma); opera productions have included Music Academy of the West (The Bartered Bride, as well as his own chamber opera Second Nature); Teatro Petruzzelli in Bari, Italy (Le Nozze di Figaro) and Juilliard Opera (Eugene Onegin). 

Aucoin is a 2012 graduate of Harvard College, where he studied with the poet Jorie Graham; and a 2013 recipient of a graduate diploma in composition from The Juilliard School, where he studied with composer Robert Beaser. Shortly before he graduated from Harvard, Aucoin was hired as the youngest Assistant Conductor in the history of the Metropolitan Opera, where he worked with Thomas Adès, James Levine, and Valery Gergiev.

Aucoin remains an active pianist and regularly collaborates with violinist Keir GoGwilt, as well as many of the world's leading opera singers, including Renée Fleming, Paulo Szot, Rod Gilfry, and Anthony Roth Costanzo. An accomplished writer, Aucoin's essays and poetry have appeared in The Yale Review, The Colorado Review, The Boston Globe, and The Harvard Advocate. He has served as guest lecturer for the New York Shakespeare Society and a guest host for New York's WQXR. 

A.R.T.: In the Body of the World, Crossing, O.P.C. Director of Dance, Senior Lecturer in Music and Theater, Dance & Media; Artistic Director of the Harvard Dance Project, at Harvard University. Graduate of Canada’s National Ballet School; a 28-year veteran of the dance field, Johnson choreographs for film, television, and the stage; has danced in over 50 tours on 5 continents. Was soloist with the National Ballet of Canada and a principal dancer and researcher in William Forsythe’s company Frankfurt Ballet. Stages Forsythe’s work worldwide, including for Paris Opera Ballet, La Scala, Batsheva Dance Company, Norwegian National Ballet, Netherlands Dance Theater, Boston Ballet, and American Ballet Theater. Is a founding collaborator of The Movement Invention Project in New York, and has served on the faculties of and created choreographic work for Princeton University, Columbia University, the Juilliard School and NYU; and has created 12 new works at Harvard since 2011 including Paper Wing, What Moves You?, and dance installations RE: RE: RE: and LOOK UP. Recent collaborations include those with the Harvard Choruses, Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center, Boston Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Dries Van Noten/Louvre Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

(she/her) Diane Paulus is the Terrie and Bradley Bloom Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University. A.R.T.: 1776, WILD: A Musical Becoming, Gloria: A Life, Jagged Little Pill, ExtraOrdinary, The White Card, In the Body of the World, Waitress (film available online, French-language production in Quebec summer 2024), Crossing, Finding Neverland, Witness Uganda, Pippin (Tony Award, Best Revival and Best Director), The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (Tony Award, Best Revival; NAACP Award, Best Direction), Prometheus Bound, Death and the Powers: The Robots’ Opera, Best of Both Worlds, The Donkey Show. Other work includes Cirque du Soleil’s Amaluna, Invisible Thread at Second Stage, and the Public Theater’s Tony Award-winning revival of HAIR on Broadway and London’s West End. As an opera director, her credits include The Magic Flute, the complete Monteverdi cycle, and the trio of Mozart-Da Ponte operas, as well as the upcoming Carmen (2024 Glydenbourne Festival). Paulus is Professor of the Practice of Theater in Harvard University’s English Department and Department of Theater, Dance & Media. She was selected for Boston magazine’s 2023, 2022, 2020, and 2018 lists of Boston’s most influential people, the 2014 Time 100, Time magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and as one of Variety’s “Trailblazing Women in Entertainment for 2014.”

A Far Cry stands at the forefront of an exciting new generation in classical music. According to the New York Times, the GRAMMY nominated self-conducted orchestra “brims with personality or, better, personalities, many and varied.” A Far Cry was founded in 2007 by a tightly-knit collective of 17 young professional musicians—the Criers—and since the beginning has fostered those personalities, developing an innovative structure of rotating leadership both on stage and behind the scenes. By expanding the boundaries of orchestral repertoire and experimenting with the ways music is prepared, performed, and experienced, A Far Cry has been embraced throughout the world with hundreds of performances coast to coast and across the globe, and hundreds of thousands of online views of live streaming concerts and YouTube archives. Dreams and Prayers and Law of Mosaics, the first albums from A Far Cry's in-house label, Crier Records, have collectively garnered a GRAMMY nomination and critical acclaim from the New Yorker’s Alex Ross. The Criers are proud to call Boston home, and maintain strong roots in the city, rehearsing at their storefront music center in Jamaica Plain and fulfilling the role of Chamber Orchestra in Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Collaborating with local students through an educational partnership with the New England Conservatory, A Far Cry aims to pass on the spirit of collaboratively-empowered music to the next generation.

A.R.T.: The Donkey Show, Sleep No More. Broadway: The Country House, The Snow Geese, Manhattan Theatre Club. Off Broadway: Sleep No More; Red Eye to Havre De Grace, New York Theatre Workshop; Choir Boy, Manhattan Theatre Club; Forces and Ascension, Streb Extreme Action Company. B.F.A. Stage Management, Emerson College.

Ryan McKittrick is the Director of Artistic Programs & Dramaturg at the American Repertory Theater. He received a Master of Theater Arts in Dramaturgy from the A.R.T./Moscow Art Theatre School Institute for Advanced Theater Training and a B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard College. He is Lecturer and Head of Dramaturgy in the Theater, Dance & Media concentration at Harvard and Assistant Professor of Theater Arts at Brandeis University. At the A.R.T., he has served as dramaturg on numerous plays, operas, and musicals, over half of which were world premieres.

A.R.T.: Evita; 1776; Moby-Dick; We Live in Cairo; Jagged Little Pill; The Black Clown; Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812; Crossing. Founding Member, A Far Cry; Principal Viola, Boston Baroque; period viola with Handel and Haydn Society, Trinity Baroque Orchestra, The English Concert, ACRONYM Ensemble, The Thirteen, Seattle and Portland Baroque Orchestras, Teatro Nuovo, Opera Lafayette, Relic, Sarasa Ensemble. Carnegie Hall Fellow and Peabody Singapore Fellow. Tours of Europe, Asia, Kazakhstan, and the Kyrgyz Republic. Performances with Pink Martini, Jake Shimabukuro, Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Kiri Te Kanawa, members of the Florestan Trio, and Æolus, Brentano, Cleveland, Emerson, Mendelssohn and St. Lawrence String Quartets. Concerts at Vienna Musikverein, Singapore Esplanade, the Kennedy Center, and Carnegie Hall. Awards: Grammy nominee (Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance). Director of Chamber Music Lab, Rivers School Conservatory.