Writer Bios Will Crutchfield, artistic director of Teatro Nuovo, has conducted opera in various theaters in the US and abroad, among them the Rossini Opera Festival (Pesaro), the Washington National Opera, Minnesota Opera, Florida Grand Opera, the Polish National Opera (Warsaw), and the Opera de Colombia (Bogotà), where he served as artistic director for a five-year term. He has also contributed musicological and journalistic articles to The Grove Dictionaries of Music, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Opera News, and many scholarly journals, and has edited Rossini’s Aureliano in Palmira for Ricordi. Julia Doe received a Ph.D. in musicology from Yale University in 2013. She is a scholar of eighteenth-century opera, with particular emphasis on the music, literature, and politics of the French Enlightenment. Her first book, The Comedians of the King (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, 2020), traces the impact of Bourbon patronage on the development of opéra comique in the final decades of the Old Regime. This monograph interrogates how comic theater was exploited in (and worked against) the construction of the monarchy’s carefully cultivated public image – examining the aesthetic, institutional, and political tensions that arose when a genre with popular roots was folded into the courtly propaganda machine. Essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Music, Music & Letters, Current Musicology, and Renaissance Quarterly. With a tenure-track appointment at Columbia, she is the recipient of the Alfred Einstein and M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet awards from the AMS, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Program, the National Opera Association, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Musicologist and patron, Nizam Kettaneh is the founder of the American Friends of Les Arts Florissants. He is a regular collaborator with Opera Lafayette’s Artistic Director Ryan Brown, serving as an artistic advisor as well as sharing his expertise with the public through Opera Lafayette lectures and program notes. He was the recipient of a fellowship in orchestra management by the League of American Orchestras. He has held various positions at the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, St. Luke’s Chamber Orchestra in NYC, and at the Children’s Guild, a school for emotionally disturbed children in Maryland. He received his Master’s degree in Sciences from the American University in Beirut, a doctorate degree in biology from Purdue University, and a Master’s degree in Business from Loyola College, Maryland. Ryan Brown is the founder and artistic director of Opera Lafayette, which is currently celebrating its 25th anniversary. Through his work with Opera Lafayette, he has gained an international reputation for his role in the revival and reassessment of significant works from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. His discography of twelve sound recordings for Naxos has focused on the French repertoire, including well-known works by composers such as Lully, Rameau, and Gluck, as well as premiere recordings of operas by Rebel/Francœur, Monsigny, Philidor, Grétry, Sacchini, and Félicien David. He has also created two DVDs with Opera Lafayette for Naxos, including the modern premiere of Gaveaux and Bouilly’s Léonore, ou L’Amour conjugal, the model for Beethoven’s Leonore, the latter which Opera Lafayette will present as this season’s centerpiece, as well as Rameau’s Les Fêtes de L’Hymen et de L’Amour, ou Les Dieux d’Egypte, a collaboration with the New York Baroque Dance Company, the Seán Curran Dance Company, and Kalanidhi Dance. He has also led performances of operas by Vivaldi, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Paisiello, and Cimarosa. He regularly appears in Washington, DC and New York with Opera Lafayette and has also conducted in San Francisco, Seattle, at The Glimmerglass Festival, and at the Opéra Royal de Versailles. He was raised in a musical family in California and performed extensively as a violinist and chamber musician before turning his attentions to conducting. His teachers included Dorothy DeLay and Gustav Meier. He is a recipient of La Médaille d’Or du Rayonnement Culturel from La Renaissance Française, and when not conducting spends his time in southwestern Colorado.
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