Leslie Dunton-Downer

Leslie Dunton-Downer has written opera libretti, plays, and television documentaries. In recent years she has also written theater pieces for performing artists from Central Asia and Iran, and produced CDs of music from Tajikistan. She studied Ancient Greek at Harvard College, and received a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, where she remained on the faculty until 1996. Founding member of the Cambridge Riverside Players, a group devoted to reading the plays of Shakespeare aloud, and recipient of honors and grants from Phi Beta Kappa, the Sheldon Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Harvard Society of Fellows, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation, Leslie resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Current projects include a second book with British co-author Alan Riding, possibly the best co-author in the world, and the libretto for a new opera by American composer Augusta Read Thomas. Their first collaboration, Ligeia, received premieres in France, Italy, the US, and Russia and, under Jury President Luciano Berio, was awarded The Orpheus International Prize for Best Chamber Opera.

John Greer

Director and Chair of Opera Studies; Collaborative Piano

New England Conservatory

John Greer is an active conductor, accompanist, vocal coach, arranger, and composer. He has worked in recital with many of Canada's most talented young singers of his generation including Nancy Argenta, Tracy Dahl, Rosemarie Landry, Linda McGuire, Kevin McMillian, Mark Pedrotti, Catherine Robbin, and Michael Schade. He has also worked with renowned American singers/teachers such as Carmen Balthrop, Linda Mabbs, Carmen Pelton, Ashley Putnam, William Sharp, Carol Webber, and Delores Ziegler. As faculty member of the University of Toronto opera division, Greer made his conducting debut in 1983, conducting numerous operas there including The Marriage of Figaro, Gianni Schicchi, Tchaikovsky's Iolanta, and Massenet's Le Portrait de Manon. He has also developed and conducted works for Victoria's Opera Piccola, Ottawa's Opera Lyra, The Banff School of Fine Arts, the Toronto Gilbert and Sullivan Society, and Mirvish Productions, the Hamilton Opera in Ontario, and the Canadian Opera Company. For five years, Greer was the music director of the Eastman Opera Theatre in Rochester, NY, conducting operas such as Le Nozze di Figaro, Candide, Albert Herring, Patience, and The Turn of the Screw. For ten seasons, his summers have been occupied with his duties as general manager and head of music staff for the Janiec Opera Company at the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina, conducting several works, including the world premier of David Liptak's chamber opera The Moon Singer. In the summer of 2008, Greer will join the music staff of Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, NY as head coach and continuo player for their production of Handel's Giulio Cesare.

Greer's original compositions include ten song cycles, as well as numerous works based on Canadian folk songs. His children's opera, The Snow Queen, after Hans Christian Anderson, was written for the Canadian Children's Opera Chorus and has already had its American premiere. The opera was recently orchestrated by Greer, and revived in Toronto before a European tour including performances in Cologne and Amsterdam. Recent work includes his second opera, an adapatation of Oscar Wilde's fairy tale The Star-Child, with librettist Ned Dickens, and his revision and orchestration of the 1889 Canadian operetta Leo the Royal Cadet by Oscar F. Telgmann, commissioned by the Toronto Operetta Theatre.

University of Manitoba and University of Southern California. Studies with Boyd McDonald, Gwendolyn Koldofsky, Brooks Smith, Malcolm Hamilton, James Fraser-Craig, Boris Goldovsky, and David Effron. Former faculty of the University of Toronto and the University of Maryland.

Christopher Caggiano

Boston Conservatory Musical Theater

A.B. Boston College, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude. Resident writer and lyricist for the Boston Gay Men's Chorus. Author of The Lost in Boston Carols, a suite of Broadway-themed Christmas songs for the BGMC's December 2003 concerts. As a performer, Chris has appeared on the following recordings: Oz and Beyond, Gloria!, Eos, Razzle Dazzle, and A Splash of Pops with the Boston Pops, under the direction of conductor Keith Lockhart, and has performed solos at Symphony Hall and Carnegie Hall. Chris is currently working on a number of book projects, including Everything I Know I Learned from Musicals

Event Description

Shakespeare in Song

Shakespeare's plays have been re-invented and re-imagined by the world's greatest opera and musical theater composers - from Benjamin Britten to Giuseppe Verdi to Leonard Bernstein to
Cole Porter. How does one set one of the world's most musical writers to music? What is gained and lost in the transition from one genre to another?

Commonwealth Shakespeare Company is proud to host our second Shakespeare Salon at the Boston Center for the Arts Mills Gallery on Monday April 20th. Please join Artistic Director Steven Maler; noted Shakespeare and opera scholar Leslie Dunton-Downer & John Greer, Chair of New England Conservartory's Opera Studies Program for an engaging conversation on Shakespeare and Music.