Hurricane Thomas: The Music of Adès Takes the World by Storm
New York City | November 14 Metropolitan Opera
Presentation by Professor Steve Swayne
Christoph Willibald Gluck, Iphigénie en Tauride (1779) (opening)
Giuseppe Verdi, Otello (1887) (opening)
Steve Swayne is a professor of music at Dartmouth College and teaches courses in art music from 1700 to the present day, opera, American musical theater, Russian music, and American music. He has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His articles have appeared in the Sondheim Review, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, American Music, Studies in Musical Theatre, the Indiana Theory Review, and the Musical Quarterly. He has contributed to commentaries on Sondheim developed by the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and the Chicago Lyric Opera. He is the author of How Sondheim Found His Sound (University of Michigan Press, 2005) and Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America's Musical Life (Oxford University Press, 2011) and is at work on a third book that examines the life and music of musical theater composer William Finn. He is an accomplished concert pianist, with four nationally distributed recordings currently in release and a performance with the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas to his credit. He has taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and at the University of California, Berkeley. Swayne is the 2012 recipient of the Nicolas Slonimsky Award for Outstanding Musical Biography.