Snapshot 2018

Death of a Playboy

Music and libretto by Brian Rosen, revolves around a heated private discussion that threatens to disrupt Hugh Hefner’s funeral. Rosen is a San Francisco based composer/performer specializing in works that marry music and theater. Brian studied music composition at Interlochen Arts Academy and computer science at Princeton University.

He moved to the Bay Area in 1993 to join Pixar Animation Studios on their first full length film, Toy Story and remains on staff at Pixar as a software engineer, technical director, and occasional voice talent. Brian has written and arranged for the a cappella ensemble The Richter Scales, completed a commissioned operatic adaptation of Alice in Wonderland for Cinnabar Opera Theater, and composed a string quartet premiered and recorded in 2010. He recently received a grant from the American Composer’s Forum for the premiere of his song cycle A Brief History of Love and Poetry.

Dynamo

Music by Larry London and libretto by William Smock, features brief, crucial scenes from the professional and family life of Thomas A. Edison. London did his undergraduate work at Harvard and earned a Master's degree in composition at Mills College. He studied with Darius Milhaud, Terry Riley and Lou Harrison. His compositions have been performed at the Aspen and Cabrillo Music Festivals, by the Oakland Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony chamber series. London has contributed as a composer, arranger or performer to over fifty films.

He composed the music for Isamu Noguchi: Stones and Paper, an American Masters documentary film, recognized as Best Portrait at the Montreal International Festival of Films in 1998. He wrote music for Joann Sfar Draws from Memory, a documentary film for KQED Public Television in 2012. Librettist Wiliam Smock produced and edited a PBS American Masters portrait of the sculptor Isamu Noguchi with music by Larry London. He has produced and/or edited several other PBS shows and dozens of industrial films and is also the author and illustrator of a book on design: The Bauhaus Ideal Then and Now.

The Last Tycoon

Music by Cyril Deaconoff and libretto adapted by David Yezzi, is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel of the same name. American composer, conductor, and organist Cyril Deaconoff, originally from Moscow, Russia is a graduate of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory (Composition and Choral Conducting) and Indiana University-Bloomington, where he studied composition with Sven-David Sandstroem.

Cyril's recent work String Quartet No.1, which can be heard on an album A Bridge of Hope, available from cdbaby.com and iTunes Store, was selected by the San Jose Chamber Orchestra for their concert of contemporary music entitled Valley Voices. Several of Cyril's works, including cantata Canticles of Love, Despair and Hope, have been published by E. C. Schirmer in Boston. In November 2011, West Bay Opera in Palo Alto presented a workshop of The Last Tycoon. In 2017, Voices of Silicon Valley led by Cyril Deaconoff presented a modern masterpiece Stimmung by Karlheinz Stockhausen for the first time in 30 years in San Francisco Bay Area.

She Who Is Alive

Music by Erling Wold and libretto by Robert Harris, features the Warlord of a futuristic empire as he gives a dissident female scientist prisoner the third degree. Wold is an eclectic composer who has also been called "the Eric Satie of Berkeley surrealist/minimalist electro-art rock" by the Village Voice. His chamber works have been presented in San Francisco and Santa Cruz by New Music Works, and by the San Francisco Conservatory New Music Ensemble. He was a resident artist at ODC Theater, who presented his opera Sub Pontio Pilato, an historical fantasy on the death and remembrance of Pontius Pilate, a chamber opera based on William Burroughs' early autobiographical novel Queer, and his critically acclaimed work A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, based on the Max Ernst collage novel.

452 Jamestown Place

Music and libretto by Katherine Saxon, where a young woman terrifies her friend with outbursts from multiple personalities. Saxon has written a wide variety of music that ranges from large-scale choral works to intricate chamber music. Her music has been performed at the Atlantic Music Festival, NACUSA events (regional and national), the Bowdoin International Music Festival, and the UCSB Primavera Festival. Her work "Speed and Perfection" received the first prize in the San Francisco Choral Artists' 2012 New Voices Competition.