Tobias Picker, described by BBC Music Magazine as "displaying a distinctively soulful style that is one of the glories of the current musical scene," has written a great range of works in every genre, drawing performances by the world’s leading musicians, orchestras and opera houses. Picker’s extensive list of commissions and performances includes those from the New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Houston Symphony, The Cleveland Orchestra, The Chicago Symphony, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the BBC Proms, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Munich and Helsinki Philharmonics. Dubbed “our finest composer for the lyric stage” by The Wall Street Journal, Picker saw his first opera Emmeline premiere at the Santa Fe Opera in 1996, a production nationally telecast on the Public Broadcasting Service’s Great Performances Series. Since that time, Picker has become recognized as one of America's foremost composers of opera, with works including his fourth opera, An American Tragedy, which was commissioned by The Metropolitan Opera and premiered at The Met in December 2005. His adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s tale Fantastic Mr. Fox was commissioned and premiered by the Los Angeles Opera and established Picker as a composer whose appeal crosses all age boundaries. Picker’s Thérèse Raquin, based on the novel by Émile Zola, was commissioned by a consortium of companies including The Dallas Opera, San Diego Opera, and Opéra de Montréal. The success of this piece brought Picker a new commission from Opera Theatre Europe for a reduced version of the opera. The reduced Thérèse Raquin premiered at the Linbury Studio of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 2006, and received its US premiere at Dicapo Opera Theatre in New York City in 2007. In 2009 Dicapo Opera again premiered a Picker opera in a new chamber orchestration, Emmeline. The performances garnered critical acclaim and further cemented Emmeline’s status as one of the great contemporary additions to the opera canon.
Biography
Tobias Picker’s Website can be found here.
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By the age of thirty, Picker was the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Bearns Prize (Columbia University), a Charles Ives Scholarship, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. From 1985-90, Picker was the first Composer-in-Residence of the Houston Symphony. In 1992, he received the prestigious Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also served as Composer-in-Residence for such major international festivals as the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival and the Pacific Music Festival. His piano concerto Keys to the City, commissioned by the City of New York on the occasion of the centenary of the Brooklyn Bridge, was described as “a vivid musical portrait of New York” by the New York Times. The Encantadas, for actor and orchestra, features texts drawn from Herman Melville’s poetic descriptions of the Galapagos Islands, and was recorded on Virgin Classics by the Houston Symphony with Sir John Gielgud. It has been performed throughout the world in seven languages. In the fall of 2008, Wergo Records released Tobias Picker: Keys to the City (WER 66952), a complete collection of the composer’s solo piano music, performed by Ursula Oppens. Recent commissions include a new string quartet for the American String Quartet which premiered in New York in January, 2009. Mr. Picker is currently at work on a new ballet commissioned by the Rambert Dance Company, set for a world premiere in Autumn, 2010. Tobias Picker’s music is published exclusively by Schott Music.
