Indian-American composer Reena Esmail works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music, and brings communities together through the creation of equitable musical spaces. Her life and music was profiled on Season 3 of the PBS Great Performances series Now Hear This, as well as Frame of Mind, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ms. Esmail divides her attention evenly between orchestral, chamber, and choral work. She has written commissions for ensembles including the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, and Kronos Quartet, and her music has featured on multiple Grammy-nominated albums, including The Singing Guitar by Conspirare, BRUITS by Imani Winds, and Healing Modes by Brooklyn Rider. Many of her choral works are published by Oxford University Press.

The Los Angeles Master Chorale’s 2020-25 Swan Family Artist in Residence, she was the Seattle Symphony’s 2020-21 Composer-in-Residence. She also holds awards/fellowships from United States Artists, the S&R Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Kennedy Center. She was composer-in-residence for Street Symphony from 2016-18 and is currently an Artistic Director of Shastra, a nonprofit organization that promotes cross-cultural music connecting music traditions of India and the West.

Ms. Esmail holds degrees in composition from the Juilliard School and the Yale School of Music. Her primary teachers have included Susan Botti, Aaron Jay Kernis, Christopher Theofanidis, Christopher Rouse, and Samuel Adler. She received a Fulbright-Nehru grant to study Hindustani music in India. Her Hindustani music teachers include Srimati Lakshmi Shankar and Gaurav Mazumdar, and she currently studies and collaborates with Saili Oak. Her doctoral thesis, entitled Finding Common Ground: Uniting Practices in Hindustani and Western Art Musicians explores the methods and challenges of the collaborative process between Hindustani musicians and Western composers.

She currently resides in her hometown of Los Angeles, California.

(12/2022)

American conductor Kyle Dickson is quickly building a reputation as an innovative and compelling presence on the podium. He is Assistant Conductor of the Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles, and he previously served as Music Director of Chicago’s South Loop Symphony. Dickson was selected as a Conducting Fellow at the 2021 National Orchestral Institute’s Conducting Academy with Marin Alsop and James Ross and from 2019 to 2021 was a Project Inclusion Freeman Conducting Fellow with Chicago Sinfonietta under the mentorship of Music Director Mei-Ann Chen. Next season, Dickson will serve as Assistant Conductor of Spoleto Festival USA for the world premiere of Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’ opera, Omar.

Dickson works regularly with youth ensembles and has given numerous masterclasses and webinars for many arts programs including the Chicago Youth Symphony Ensembles and Ravinia’s El Sistema program. Beginning his career as a violinist, Dickson was a prizewinner at the 2010 NANM National Concerto Competition and has held residencies at Indiana University-South Bend and the United World College of South East Asia as a chamber musician. In 2021, Dickson earned his master’s degree in orchestral conducting from Northwestern University studying with Victor Yampolsky. He also received degrees in violin performance from Michigan State University (BM) and DePaul University (MM). His principal violin teachers included Walter Verdehr, Laura Roelofs, and Olga Kaler. Learn more about Kyle J. Dickson.

Creativity, theatricality, and virtuosity have long defined the musical adventures of two-time Grammy Award-winning soprano, vocalist, and actress Hilá Plitmann. Widely recognized as one of today’s foremost interpreters of contemporary music, she regularly premieres new works by a diverse array of composers including Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Del Tredici, Frank Zappa, Aaron Jay Kernis, Thomas Adès, Jeff Beal, Xiaogang YE, Paola Prestini, Danaë Vlasse, and John Corigliano.

Her appearances as soloist have included the Los Angeles, New York, and Israel philharmonics; Chicago, Boston, London, BBC, National, St. Louis, Atlanta, Albany, Detroit, Hamburg, Stockholm, and Melbourne symphonies; and the Minnesota and Orpheus Chamber orchestras. She can also be heard as featured vocal soloist on film soundtracks for The Da Vinci Code, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Hail Caesar, and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Her discography includes Corigliano’s song cycle Mr. Tambourine Man and Vlasse’s Mythologies (both Grammy winners for Best Classical Vocal Performance); Andrea Clearfield’s Women of Valor with Tovah Feldshuh; Richard Danielpour’s Toward a Season and Peace and Grammy Award-winning Passion of Yeshua; Eric Whitacre’s Good Night Moon; and George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill.

Hilá first took the opera stage at age 14 with the Israeli Opera, and she continues to perform with companies across the US, including notable roles in works by Stephen Schwartz, Mark Adamo, Gerald Barry, and Yuval Sharon and Annie Gosfield. She was nominated as Best Actress in a Musical by the Los Angeles Ovation Awards and L.A. Ticketholder Awards for her performance in Eric Whitacre’s groundbreaking electro-musical Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings. With jazz guitarist Shea Welsh and tabla virtuoso Aditya Kalyanpur, she recently co-founded Renaissance Heart, a global music project melding classical, jazz, folk, rock, and world music.
Hilá’s work is informed by her love of poetry, focus on discipline (she holds a black belt in Tae Kwon Do), and engagement with nature. She hopes her artistic risk-taking emboldens audiences to expand their comfort zones.

(12/2022)