the loser

Rod Gilfry is a two-time Grammy nominee, singer and actor who has performed in all the world's music capitals and appears on over 30 recordings. He is acclaimed worldwide in opera, musicals, recitals and cabaret. His 75-role repertoire includes 13 leading roles he has created in new operas. Recent performances include LA Opera productions of David Lang's solo opera the loser and Matthew Aucoin's Crossing, and Jake Heggie's It's a Wonderful Life at the San Francisco Opera. He recently created the role of Claudius in Brett Dean's Hamlet at the Glyndebourne and Adelaide Festivals, a role he reprised in the 2021/22 season at the Metropolitan Opera.  

Other appearances for the season include the Marquis de la Force in Houston Grand Opera’s Dialogues of the Carmelites and Robert McNamara in the world premiere of Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang’s The Rift at the Washington National Opera. 

In 2019, he began a tour of Kevin Puts’ The Brightness of Light with Renée Fleming at the Tanglewood Festival, which was later performed with the National Symphony, Colorado Symphony, Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Future performances of The Brightness of Light are scheduled for the Aspen Festival, Lyric Opera of Chicago and Oregon Symphony. 

Future seasons will find Mr. Gilfry singing Alfonso in Così fan tutte with the Dallas Opera, Scarpia in the Houston Grand Opera’s Tosca, Claudius in Dean’s Hamlet and Bartolo in The Marriage of Figaro at Munich’s Bavarian State Opera. 

He earned advanced degrees from California State University Fullerton and the University of Southern California. From 1987 to 1989 he was a member of the Frankfurt Opera ensemble, and from 1989 to 1994 he was a member of the Zurich Opera ensemble. He is in his 14th year as a professor of vocal arts at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, but will retire from that position in December 2022 to make more time for performing.

(RodGilfry.com)

In 2011, the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars and the Department of Education named him a Presidential Scholar in the Arts, and the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts awarded him a YoungArts gold medal in music. Later that year, he was named a Gilmore Young Artist, an honor awarded every two years highlighting the most promising American pianists of the new generation. In 2012, he was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, and in 2018 was named a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist. Tao begins his 2018/19 season with the world premiere of his composition Everything Must Go, commissioned and performed by the New York Philharmonic. He also inaugurates Nightcap, a new series at the New York Philharmonic where performers curate a late-night concert, joined by dancer-choreographer Caleb Teicher and Charmaine Lee for an evening of multidisciplinary performances. In 2019, he and dancer-choreographer Caleb Teicher continue to develop More Forever, their evening-length multidisciplinary work which explores American vernacular dance traditions, as part of Guggenheim’s Works & Process series. In February 2019, he makes his LA Opera debut in the West Coast premiere of David Lang’s the loser, where he plays the onstage role of the apparition and memory of Glenn Gould.

David Lang is one of America’s most honored and performed composers. His score for Paolo Sorrentino’s film Youth received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations, among others. Other recent work includes man made, a concerto for solo percussion quartet and orchestra, co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony; the large orchestra work mountain for the Cincinnati Symphony; the opera anatomy theater, written in collaboration with visual artist Mark Dion, at LA Opera; and the whisper opera for International Contemporary Ensemble, which premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. His most recent work at BAM was love fail, written for Anonymous 4, with stories by Lydia Davis and texts, music and stage direction by Mr. Lang.

She has conducted and sung on more than 85 film soundtracks, and has worked with Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Bramwell Tovey, Leonard Slatkin, Zubin Mehta, Pierre Boulez, Michael Tilson Thomas, Laura Jackson, and John Adams. Leighton has premiered more than 50 new compositions as a conductor since 2009, and most recently collaborated with composer John Wineglass for the premiere of his newest work for chorus and orchestra, Voices of the West, premiered in October 2018. In 2016, Leighton co-produced Los Angles Master Chorale’s David Lang national anthems album. Later this season, she will conduct Lang’s work crowd out with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She will also collaborate with Barbara Hannigan for Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress, in Leighton’s debut with the Ojai Festival in June 2019. 

Her recent work in dance includes Justin Peck's Dances in the Cenotaph for Newton for New York City Ballet and Twyla Tharp's Deuce Coupe for ABT. Her recent work in theater includes To Kill a Mockingbird at the Schubert Theater, NYC, and Richard Nelson's direction of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the Old Globe. In opera, recent credits include Sir David McVicar's Elektra at the Lyric Theater of Chicago and Bernstein's Candide at the Clarence Brown Theater in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Jim Findlay works across boundaries as a theater artist, visual artist, and filmmaker. His work includes his original performances Vine of the Dead (2015), Dream of the Red Chamber (2014), Botanica (2012) and the direction and design of David Lang‘s the whisper opera as well as the unreleased 3D film Botanica. His video installation in collaboration with Ralph Lemon, Meditation, is in the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center. He was a founding member of the Collapsable Giraffe and in partnership with Radiohole founded the Collapsable Hole, a multi-disciplinary artist led performance venue recently relocated to Manhattan’s West Village.

In addition to his work as an independent artist, he maintains a long career as a collaborator with many theater, performance and music artists including Bang on a Can, Daniel Fish, Aaron Landsman, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Ridge Theater,  Ralph Lemon, the Wooster Group, Radiohole, Stew and Heidi Rodewald and Julia Wolfe.  His work has been seen at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, BAM, Arena Stage, A.R.T. and over 50 cities internationally. In 2016 he received a Creative Capital Award for his project Electric Lucifer and in 2015 he received the Foundation for Contemporary Art Artist Grant.  He was a MacDowell Colony Fellow in 2012 and 2016. Other recognition includes two Obie Awards, two Bessie Awards, two Princess Grace Awards, a Lortel and a Hewes Awards and residencies at Baryshnikov Arts Center, UCross, MassMOCA and Mount Tremper Arts.

Learn more at JimFindlayNYC.com.

Her most recent performance Farmhouse/Whorehouse, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor, was presented in 2018 by UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance at the Ace Theater, The Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Wexner Center for the Arts and the CounterCurrent Festival in Houston.

A major show of Bocanegra's work titled Poorly Watched Girls opened at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia in 2018 and continues through 2019. Bocanegra’s design work has been seen in sets and costumes made for Big Dance Theater, Sibyl Kempson's Seven Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co. and Pam Tanowitz Dance among others.