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this season
For information about this season's shows, click the images below.
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About us
Morningside Opera is run by a board of musicians and theater professionals. The board is responsible for the development of the company's artistic programming as well as all aspects of its administration. Click on a thumbnail below to read about each member.
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Annie Holt
Annie Holt directs, dramaturges, costume designs, and teaches around the New York City area, and is co-founder of Morningside Opera. Recent New York credits include directing Morningside Opera's production of Britten's The Beggar's Opera, producing their 2008-09 season of Alcide al bivio, A Hand of Bridge, Der Schauspieldirektor, and A Game of Chance, directing a swingin' sixties production of As You Like It at the Schapiro Theatre (2009), providing dramaturgy for A Streetcar Named Desire (2009, Columbia Stages), and costume designing A Midsummer Night's Dream (2008, Invisible Theatre).
Annie received her BA in Dramaturgy from the University of Virginia, and an MA in Theatre from Columbia University, where she continues to study as a Faculty Fellow and doctoral candidate in Theatre. She has been the grateful recipient of a Beinecke Scholarship, a Mellon Fellowship in archival research, and the Elizabeth Cady Staunton Prize for writing in the field of gender studies.
In 2007, Annie enjoyed venturing into the field of puppetry and downtown theatre as a production assistant for Basil Twist. In 2003-2005, she was honored to serve as the Assistant Director of the Opera Festival di Roma, a summer opera festival in Rome, Italy, directed by Louisa Panou and conducted by Francesco Carotenuto. From 2004-06 she had the opportunity to delve deeply into early modern Italian opera, as a research assistant to musicologist Marita McClymonds. Currently, Annie is teaching Women and Gender Studies at Columbia and writing her dissertation on early-twentieth-century developments in costume design. -
Brittany Palmer
Brittany Palmer is thrilled to join Morningside Opera in the quest to produce and promote classical opera theatre in a contemporary and relevant form suited for modern day audiences. Trained as soprano at Florida State University and the Eastman School of Music, her performing career has included solo performances and roles with Opera North, Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Western New York Chamber Orchestra, Osh Opera, Opera Gaya, Morningside Opera, University of North Florida, New York Sinfonia, and Encompass New Opera Theatre among others. Some of her favorite performances include Susanna
(Le Nozze di Figaro), La Comtesse Adèle (Le Comte Ory), Lucy Lockit (The Beggar's Opera), Ariane (Ariane – Martinu), Drusilla (L'Incoronazione di Poppea), Blondie (Die Entführung aus dem Seraglio), as well as the soprano solos for Bach's St. Matthew Passion, Carmina Burana, Fauré's Requiem, and Haydn's Lord Nelson Mass. Upcoming engagements include Vera in A Month in the Country with Delaware Valley Opera and Ruth Putnam in The Crucible with Empire Opera. For more information, please visit Brittany's website at www.brittanyleighpalmer.com. -
Michael Shaw
While at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music as an undergraduate, Michael Shaw sang leading baritone roles in over ten operas and presented eight Lieder and song recitals. He received an MA in Musicology from the University of Notre Dame du Lac in 2006, where he had the opportunity to play The Director in Poulenc's Les mamelles de Terisias. Michael is currently working toward his PhD at Columbia University. His dissertation considers the connection between Gnosticism and Franz Schubert. Michael has performed in all three of Morningside Opera's productions, and looks forward to participating in more in the future. Michael is also a bit of a diletante webSmith, and is responsible for designing this website.
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Brett Umlauf
Soprano Brett Umlauf earned a degree in Classics from Dartmouth College, completed additional coursework in languages and music at Columbia University and Mannes College of Music and studied voice with John Fiorito and Mary Ellen Callahan. Since 2005 she has held the position of soloist at 10th Church of Christ, Scientist, Greenwich Village. Brett is proud to be a founding member of the female baroque trio Charites as well as co-creator of Bellman om Bellman, a show about the Swedish rococo poet and composer Carl Michael Bellman. Brett has lectured on women and Bellman's music at Columbia University, and her travels to Stockholm for Bellman research and performance have been supported by grants from both the Swedish Institute and the Swedish Women's Educational Association. She is very happy to be a part of Morningside Opera.
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Amber Youell
Amber Youell is a mezzo-soprano and 18th-century scholar who loves wigs and coloratura. In October 2012, she completed her PhD in historical musicology from Columbia University, with a dissertation on opera, fashion, money, and politics at the court of Empress Maria Theresia. For Morningside’s 2009 production of Alcide al bivio, Amber constructed a performance score from manuscript and acted as dramaturg. She has taught underground music courses at Columbia University and Manhattan College, and has been published in Early Modern Women and Eighteenth-Century Music. Amber received a Whiting Fellowship for her research in 2010-2011, and has received awards from the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music and Society for Eighteenth-Century Music. She helped design innovative classical music tours in Europe for premiere tour operator Tauck World Discovery. Amber lives in Norwalk, CT, with her partner Michael Shaw and their daughter Nike.
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Minou Arjomand
Minou Arjomand earned her Master's degree in Theatre from Columbia University, where she is currently working on a doctoral thesis about theatrical politics in the 20th century. She has held production internships at each of Berlin's three opera houses, including the Staatsoper's world premiere of Hans Werner Henze's Phaedra, designed by Olafur Eliasson. She has received grants from the Fulbright, DAAD, and Mellon Foundation and is currently a fellow of the Deutsche Bank Foundation's Akademie Musiktheater Heute. Minou has attended workshops at festivals across Europe, including MozartPrisma in Schwetzingen and the Aix Festival's Atelier Opéra en Création. She is currently working as a dramaturg on an installation-opera Inner Life: Flight, Asylum, and Deportation in Europe, presented by the Opera Frankfurt (world premiere: October 2010). Minou has been a member of Morningside Opera since its inception. In its first season she directed Barber's Hand of Bridge, and directed Atra in 2009.
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Sean Parr
Sean Parr co-founded Morningside Opera and sings professionally as a lyric tenor. He has performed with opera companies throughout the U.S., including Opera North, Natchez Opera, Regina Opera, Eastern Festival Opera, and Brooklyn Repertory Opera. Roles he has performed include Ferrando in Cosí fan tutte, Rodolfo in Puccini's La bohème, and the title roles in Gounod's Faust and Handel's Acis and Galatea. Sean completed his PhD in Historical Musicology at Columbia University in 2009, with a disseration entitled Melismatic Madness: Coloratura and Female Vocality in Mid Nineteenth-Century French and Italian Opera. While at Columbia, he taught Music Humanities, directed the Collegium Musicum, served as President of the University-wide Graduate Student Advisory Council, and edited the reviews section of Current Musicology (fall 2009). Sean is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Dickinson College, where he teaches music history and conducts the Collegium.
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Mark Seto
Mark Seto leads a wide-ranging musical life as a conductor, scholar, teacher, and violinist. He is the founding music director of Morningside Opera and a conductor of the Chelsea Symphony. He recently completed a three-year appointment as assistant conductor of the New York Youth Symphony, and has also served as the assistant conductor of the Yale Symphony Orchestra and the Columbia University Orchestra. Recent engagements include collaborations with actors David Hyde Pierce and Charles Busch, and the western hemisphere premiere of Hasse and Metastasio's Alcide al bivio with Morningside Opera.
Mark holds a BA in Music from Yale University and an MA and MPhil in Historical Musicology from Columbia University. He studied at the Pierre Monteux School for Conductors in Maine, where he served as an assistant to music director Michael Jinbo for two seasons. His conducting teachers include Lawrence Leighton Smith and Shinik Hahm, and he has participated in workshops with Kenneth Kiesler, Daniel Lewis, Donald Portnoy, Donald Thulean, and Paul Vermel. He was the 2003 recipient of the Yale Friends of Music Prize and has been honored with an ASCAP Morton Gould award. He is a PhD candidate in Historical Musicology at Columbia University, where his research focuses on symphonic culture in fin-de-siècle Paris.
executive boardadvisory board
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Reviews of Morningside Opera have appeared in the New York Times, Esprit (France), Opera News, The Happiest Medium, meg's new music bolg, Stage Mage, and others. Below are some excerpts.
New York Times
Steve Smith, 1 September 2011
Review of JUDGMENT OF PARIS...the most remarkable thing about “The Judgment of Paris,” a scrappy but spirited pastiche presented by Morningside Opera at the East Village bar Jimmy’s No. 43 on Tuesday night, wasn’t its informal setting or libidinous character but its serious foundation in rigorous musicology.
...it was bold imagination and musical diligence that marked this company as one to watch.
Open the whole review in a new tab here. -
Esprit
Dick Howard, March-April 2011
Review of ATRA...les membres du groupe ont construit une histoire d’amour moderne – un triangle lesbien – qui met en oeuvre des thèmes classiques de la tradition de l’opera seria. Il s’agit d’une oeuvre multimédia où le chant et la danse classique se combinent sur un fond écrit et illustré par des exemples contemporains projetés sur le mur blanc...Le thème lesbien ne relève pas d’une provocation ni d’une exagération; il était suggéré par le grand nombre de duos pour sopranos qui émaillent l’opera seria. Cela donne lieu à une méditation sur le mariage contemporain et des liens qui relient (et délient) les partenaires; mais cette mise en forme par des moyens appris du passé permet à la fois une perception décalée du contemporain, qui n’est aussi « moderne » qu’on le croit, et une appréciation de l’actualité de ces méthodes qui ne sont pas en fin de compte pas si « baroques » qu’on le dit.
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Stage Mage
Jon Sobel, 19 May 2012,
Review of JUDGE ME PARIS, with Company XIV and Siren BaroqueThree superb singers, Amber Youell, Brett Umlauf, and Brittany Palmer, sing the roles of the deities with vocal quality and skill of the highest order; Umlauf shows especial versatility as Athena, conveying domineering military command and then delivering pretty, fluttery melodies with exquisite perfection…
Open the whole review in a new tab here. -
The Happiest Medium
Geoffrey Paddy Johnson, 31 January 2012
Review of STABAT MATER FABULOSA...Their stripped down presentation was both scholastically dense as well as visually provocative.
...Brett Umlauf and Amber Youell were respectively the soprano and alto performers and displayed a real harmonizing intimacy in their singing, despite all the distractions they had to attend to. Kelly Savage was the stalwart keyboard accompanist, and Laura Careless devised choreography and movement. The projections were supplied by Jessica Ng, and the utterly thoughtful and no less fabulous costumes were the work of Annie Holt. One would hope and think that this production was on the radar of the opera community, and that it should stimulate the sort of discussion and investigation that Morningside Opera aspire to provoke. For all its playful heart, Stabat Mater Fabulosa ultimately proves perfectly serious.
Open the whole review in a new tab here. -
meg's new music blog
Meg Willhoite, 30 January 2012
Review of STABAT MATER FABULOSA...One of my favorite aspects of the performance was the emphasis on how much discomfort really went into being a fashionable lady in the 18th century. As Brett and Amber pulled on tight stockings and garters, pranced around in 3-inch stilettos, and laced each other up in constrictive corsets–not to mention the mile high wigs and cumbersome underskirt hoops–the link between the perverse pleasure-in-pain of the music and the women’s clothing of the time became apparent.
Open the whole review in a new tab here. -
meg's new music blog
Meg Willhoite, 12 September 2011
Review of JUDGMENT OF PARIS...As always with MO, the singing, acting, and staging were superb, all of which are crucial when performing in spaces that don’t typically host operatic events and are therefore lean on extravagant sets. Throughout the concert I felt like I was experiencing this particular opera in the perfect setting, where the humor and innuendo could be uninhibitedly appreciated.
Open the whole review in a new tab here. -
meg's new music blog
Meg Willhoite, 11 February 2011
Review of ATRA, OSSIA L'AMORE RICORDATACombining powerful voices with cogent acting, the quartet of singers brought off the plot seamlessly, backed by a lively orchestra that made effective use of period instruments like the theorbo and violone.
Open the whole review in a new tab here. -
The Happiest Medium
Karen Tortora-Lee, 7 December 2010
Review of DIVA SEARCH, Opera Karaoke...And let me just state for the record – it’s nights like last Thursday that make me 100% positive that I will NEVER leave New York City because if you think there are other places in this world where polished opera singers are sitting around, tossing back cocktails in between rousing choruses of Edelweiss before then cheering on a burlesque dancer – think again.
Open the whole review in a new tab here.
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Conferences hosted by Morningside Opera
In conjunction with William Kentridge's new production of Shostakovich's The Nose, Columbia University, the Theatre Program at Barnard College, the Interarts and Theater-Fest programs of the Freie Universität, Berlin, the Morningside Opera Company and the Metropolitan Opera will collaborate in a four-day program that brings together graduate students and scholars for a series of performances and a day of round-table discussions.
The culminating day of discussions will be held at NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge. Each round table will feature four presenters who will briefly discuss their impressions of Kentridge's work and raise some questions for the group. The bulk of each session will be spent in open discussion: there will be no formal presentation of papers.
The conference was organized by Minou Arjomand, Doctoral Candidate in Theater, Columbia University, in collaboration with Professor Lydia Goehr, Philosophy, Columbia University and Professor Klaus Krueger, Art History, Freie Universität, Berlin. -
Support Morningside Opera
Morningside Opera's mission to revitalize opera and create new audiences is impossible without donor support. If you share our belief in this mission, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Morningside Opera, which receives 501(c)(3) non-profit status through the umbrella arts-management company, Fractured Atlas. Click this star
or the link to the right to donate online by credit card.
We are truly grateful for your support! -
We're for hire!
Hire Morningsire Opera for an event. We can bring our Judgment of Paris to the venue of your choice, or provide singers to perform opera favorites.
This holiday season, hire us to sing your favorite selections from Handel's Messiah.
Contact us for details about pricing and possibilities.
