Rinde Eckert in Steve Mackey’s SLIDE

RINDE ECKERT IS A WRITER, COMPOSER, LIBRETTIST, MUSICIAN, PERFORMER AND DIRECTOR.

His Opera / New Music Theatre productions have toured throughout America and to major theater festivals in Europe and Asia. With a virtuosic command of gesture, language and song, this total theatre artist moves beyond the boundaries of what a ‘play,’ a ‘dance piece,’ an ‘opera’ or ‘musical’ might be, in the service of grappling with complex issues. Eckert describes many of his characters as “little men with big ideas whose consequences of their hubris are often disastrous.” Sometimes tragic and austere, sometimes broadly comedic, entirely grounded by presence, his work is alchemical: moving from rumination and distillation to hard-won illumination, or its lack.

RINDE ECKERT BEGAN HIS CAREER AS A WRITER AND PERFORMER

in the 1980’s, writing librettos for Paul Dresher (Pioneer, Power Failure, Slow Fire, Ravenshead). He composed dance scores for choreographers Sarah Shelton Mann and Margaret Jenkins, including the evening-length Woman, Window, Square for The Margaret Jenkins Dance Company.
Rinde began composing and performing his own music/theater works in 1992 with The Gardening of Thomas D, an homage to Dante which subsequently toured the United States and France. Staged works for solo performer include Becoming…Unusual: The Education of an Eclectic; three one-act plays: An Idiot Divine, Romeo Sierra Tango and Quit This House; and works for radio including Shoot the Moving Things and Four Songs Lost in a Wall.  In February 2017 Rinde opened the inaugural season of Renée Fleming’s Voices Series at the Kennedy Center where he premiered his recital Rin: Tales from the Life of a Troubadour.

Steven Mackey was born in 1956, to American parents stationed in Frankfurt, Germany.  He is regarded as one of the leading composers of his generation and has composed for orchestra, chamber ensembles, dance and opera. His first musical passion was playing the electric guitar, in rock bands based in northern California.  He blazed a trail in the 1980’s and 90’s by including the electric guitar and vernacular music influence in his concert music. He regularly performs his own work, including two electric guitar concertos and numerous solo and chamber works. He is also active as an improvising musician and performs with his band Big Farm.

Mackey’s orchestral music has been performed by major orchestras around the world, from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco and Chicago Symphonies, the BBC Philharmonic, Concertgebouw orchestra, and the Austrian Radio Symphony, to the Sydney Symphony and Tokyo Philharmonic. As a guitarist, Mackey has performed his chamber music with the Kronos Quartet, Arditti Quartet, London Sinfonietta, Nexttime Ensemble (Parma), Psappha (Manchester), and Joey Baron.

Recent premiers include One Red Rose, for the Brentano String Quartet, commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the Nasher Sculpture Center and Yellow Barn for the 50th anniversary of the assassination of J.F.K, Stumble to Grace, his piano concerto for Orli Shaham, co-commissioned by the LA Philharmonic, the St. Louis and New Jersey Symphonies, Urban Ocean commissioned by the Aquarium of the Pacific and TONIC, an orchestral work for the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia.

He is currently working on a large multi-movement orchestral work co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Sydney Symphony, the National Symphony and the New World Symphony to premiere in 2015. Upcoming projects include a trumpet concerto for virtuoso Hakan Hardenberger commissioned by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra.

Mackey has been honored by numerous awards including a Grammy, several awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center Friedheim award and many others. He has been the composer-in-residence at major music festivals, including Tanglewood, Aspen and the Holland Festival.

His opera/monodrama, Ravenshead, for tenor/actor (Rinde Eckert) and electro-acoustic band/ensemble (the Paul Dresher Ensemble), has been performed nearly 100 times and is available on a MINMAX CD.  In a year-end review of cultural events, USA Today crowned the work the “Best New Opera of 1998.”

There are a dozen CD’s of Mackey’s music and many other CD’s that contain individual works. Dreamhouse (2010) and Lonely Motel: Music From Slide(2011) were each nominated for 4 Grammy awards. Mackey won a Grammy for Best Small Ensemble Performance for Lonely Motel.

Mackey is currently Professor of Music and chair of the Department of Music at Princeton University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1985.  Helping to shape the next generation of composers and musicians, he teaches composition, theory, twentieth century music, improvisation, and a variety of special topics.  He regularly coaches and conducts new work by student composers, as well as 20th-century classics.  He was the recipient of Princeton University’s first Distinguished Teaching Award in 1991.

Mackey’s web site is www.stevenmackey.com.  His music is published by Boosey & Hawkes. He lives in Princeton New Jersey with his wife, composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, and their son Jasper and daughter Dylan.

With mounting success in both symphonic and operatic repertoire, Jayce Ogren is building a reputation as one of the finest young conductors to emerge from the United States in recent seasons. He has recently been named the new Artistic Director of Orchestra 2001 in Philadelphia.

Jayce Ogren began the 2016/17 season leading concerts with the Utah Symphony, the Brevard Music Festival, and the Colorado Symphony, and performances of Rufus Wainwright’s Prima Donna in Montreal – a work he premiered in New York and recorded for Deutsche Grammophone with the BBC Symphony. He once again leads a concert version of the work at the Paris Philharmonie at the end of the season. He guests also with the Princeton Symphony, at the Casa da Musica in Portugal, and returns to the Indianapolis Symphony in a season of repertoire ranging from an all-Mozart program to Vaughan Williams’ Third Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique toJohn Luther Adams’ Inuksuit and Harold Meltzer’s Variations on a Summer Day in a performance at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust and subsequent recording.

Highlights of last season include leading Rossini’s La Cenerentola at the Music Academy of the West and conducting the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris in a program of Stockhausen, Jodlowski, Nono, and Andrew Norman. He led subscription weeks with the Colorado, Edmonton and Victoria Symphony orchestras, and Orchestra 2001; Bernstein’s West Side Story with film for the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Dallas Symphony; and the world premiere of Jack Perla’s Shalimar the Clown for the Opera Theatre of St. Louis.

Jayce has led the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa with Emanuel Ax; Basil Twist’s Rite of Spring with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival; the New York Philharmonic in their CONTACT! series of contemporary music; and new productions of Benjamin Britten’s Turn of the Screw and Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto with the New York City Opera, where he was Music Director, as well as Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Bernstein’s A Quiet Place, for which he won extensive critical acclaim. He also made his Canadian Opera debut in Stravinsky’s The Nightingale & Other Short Fables and reprised The Turn of the Screw in staged performances with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

Stepping in for James Levine, Jayceled the world premiere of Peter Lieberson’s song cycle Songs of Love and Sorrow with Gerald Finley with the Boston Symphony. His several engagements with the New York Philharmonic have included leading premieres of new works on their CONTACT! Series, and leading two concerts during the inaugural NY PHIL BIENNIAL. He has conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the New World Symphony, and led all-Stravinsky programs with the New York City Ballet.

Jayce Ogren’s extensive work in contemporary music has included collaborations with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) in programs at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, and at the Wien Modern Festival. He also conducted world premieres in Nico Muhly’s contemporary festival, “A Scream and an Outrage,” with the BBC Symphony at the Barbican.

European guest engagements have included the RTE National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, and Robert Carson’s production of My Fair Lady at the Chatelet in Paris. He led the European premiere of Bernstein’s re-mastered West Side Story film with live orchestra with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall, which he repeated with the Detroit Symphony and the National Arts Centre Orchestra. He also traveled to South Africa to lead the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic, appeared with the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, the Copenhagen Philharmonic, the Asturias Symphony, and led Le Nozze di Figaro at the Verbier Festival Academy.

A native of Washington State, Ogren received his Bachelor’s Degree in Composition from St. Olaf College in 2001 and his Master’s Degree in Conducting from the New England Conservatory in 2003. With a Fulbright Grant, he completed a postgraduate diploma in orchestral conducting at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm where he studied with the legendary Jorma Panula and spent two summers at the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen. He was appointed by Franz Welser-Möst as Assistant Conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra and Music Director of the Cleveland Youth Orchestra and has led the Cleveland Orchestra in regular season subscription concerts and at The Blossom Festival.

As a composer, Ogren’s works have been performed at the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music, the Brevard Music Center, the American Choral Directors Association Conference and the World Saxophone Congress. His Symphonies of Gaia has been performed by ensembles on three continents and is the title track on a DVD featuring the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra.

Ogren is an award-winning triathlete, most recently completing the 2015 Boston 2 Big Sur Challenge running the Boston Marathon and the Big Sur Marathon back to back. He also completed the 2014 Ironman Lake Placid Triathlon and one week later finished fourth in his age group in the 2014 New York City Triathlon.

He makes his home in Brooklyn, New York.