German conductor CHRISTIAN REIF, who has quickly established a name for himself as a fast-rising talent, is Music Director of the Lakes Area Music Festival of Minnesota. His 2021–22 engagements include appearances with the Hallé Orchestra, Munich Radio Orchestra, Orchestre National de Leon, Odense Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, New World Symphony, and Kansas City Symphony. He also leads a Juilliard Opera production of The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Juilliard School’s Peter Jay Sharp Theater in his New York City opera debut. He recently conducted the Stavanger Symphony in a program of works by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Samuel Barber, and he made his debut in March 2021 with the Orchestre National d’île de France in a streamed performance of Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète.

Mr. Reif is the former resident conductor of the San Francisco Symphony and music director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, and former conducting fellow with the New World Symphony and at the Tanglewood Music Center. He studied with Alan Gilbert at Juilliard and Dennis Russell Davies at the Mozarteum Salzburg. He is winner of the 2015 German Operetta Prize, awarded by the German Music Council, and two Kulturförderpreise awards given to promising artists of the region who promote cultural advancement in their communities.

London-born Anna Clyne is a Grammy-nominated composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music. Her work often includes collaborations with cutting-edge choreographers, visual artists, filmmakers, and musicians worldwide.

Ms. Clyne served as a Mead Composer-in-Residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 2010 to 2015. She also served as composer-in-residence for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra during the 2015-16 season and for L’Orchestre National d’Île-de-France from 2014 to 2016. This season, she is an Artist-in-Residence at National Sawdust in New York. She was also selected by the League of American Orchestras and New Music USA to serve as the Music Alive Composer-in-Residence with the Berkeley Symphony through the 2018–19 season.

During the 2017–18 season, the BBC Scottish Symphony performs the world premiere of Ms. Clyne’s Beltane in Glasgow. Recent highlights include the premiere of her mandolin concerto for Avi Avital, Three Sisters, performed with the Kremerata Baltica; Masquerade for the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Last Night of the Proms (also to be performed by the San Francisco Symphony in October 2018); This Lunar Beauty for the Britten Sinfonia and soprano Julia Doyle; RIFT, a symphonic ballet in collaboration with choreographer Kitty McNamee for Marin Alsop and the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra; Pocket Book VIII for Roomful of Teeth; and her violin concerto, The Seamstress, performed by Jennifer Koh with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Ms. Clyne was nominated for the 2015 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for her double violin concerto, Prince of Clouds. She is also the recipient of the 2016 Hindemith Prize, a Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a grant from Opera America to develop a new opera, Eva.

(April 2018)