PATRICIA-MARIA WEINMANN

Co-Artistic Director

Patricia-Maria Weinmann has worked with many national opera companies and festivals including Utah Opera, Opera on the James, Syracuse Opera, Florida Grand Opera, Seagle Music Colony, Boston Lyric Opera, Central City Opera, Opera Boston, Ashlawn Opera Festival, the American Opera Project, Opera Providence, and Mississippi Grand Opera.  She has collaborated on a number of premier performances including Daniel Pinkham’s The Cask of Amontillado, the staged orchestral premier of Scott Wheeler’s The Construction of Boston and Wheeler’s Democracy as a work-in-progress for the American Opera Project in New York.  Recent directing engagements have included Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night, Hansel and Gretel, Cosi fan tutte, The Mikado, The Pirates of Penzance, Cole!, Cenerentola, Carmina Burana, L’elisir d’amore, Sweeney Todd, Don Pasquale and Faust and Marguerite (BOC). Over the past 20 years, Weinmann served on the faculties of both Boston Conservatory and the New England Conservatory of Music.  As a guest director and coach for Utah Opera’s Young Artist Program and a faculty member of American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria, she continues to train some of the most promising young singers in the United States and abroad. 

GREG SMUCKER

Co-Artistic Director

Greg Smucker is a director and teacher of theater and opera. He studied with the late Wesley Balk, a noted pioneer in the field of singer-actor training. Greg was co-founder and artistic director of 15 HEAD, a critically acclaimed experimental theater company in Minneapolis and served as managing director of Theatre for Young America in Kansas City, a professional theater for children. Greg served for seven years on the faculty of the Opera Studies Department at New England Conservatory of Music and is currently a faculty member of the American Institute for Musical Studies in Graz, Austria.  As a freelance director, Greg has directed productions and workshops for theaters and opera companies in Boston and the Twin Cities.

TIAN HUI NG

Music Director

Tian Hui Ng is Music Director of the Pioneer Valley Symphony, the Victory Players, a contemporary music ensemble supported by the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts, and resident conductor of the Boston New Music Initiative. An advocate of new music, he has assisted in and premiered new works by Pulitzer and Rome Prize winners Curt Cacioppo, Aaron Jay Kernis, David Sanford, and Joan Tower among many others. Since his first opera, Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress at age 20, he has conducted many new works including unusual firsts like the first Nigerian opera in Yoruba, Irin Ajo in 2018. His passion for inter-disciplinary and intercultural music making has led to a rich array of work for ballet, film, theatre, installation art, modern dance, animation, sculpture and even sand painting, in a career that spans Europe, Asia and North America. In 2020, he looks forward to the culmination of a three-year commissioning project, El Puerto Rico, celebrating the musical heritage of Puerto Rico, a collaboration with White Snake Projects on Elena Ruehr's Cosmic Cowboy, and the restoration of Thomas de Hartmann's Piano Concerto.  

JEAN ANDERSON

Vocal Coach

Jean Anderson coaches opera, art song, and diction at The Boston Conservatory at Berklee and also teaches at New England Conservatory. She is the organist and choir director at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Scituate, MA, and performs as a collaborative pianist throughout the US and Europe. Former faculty of Miami University, and Cincinnati Christian University. Collier works frequently with Opera Providence, Longwood Opera, and Boston Lyric Opera, and is a coach at Northern Arizona University’s summer opera program in Italy, "Flagstaff in Fidenza." She has served as an accompanist and assistant conductor for choruses at Harvard University, and as accompanist and diction coach for the Back Bay Chorale in Boston. She has also worked as a coach at the Brevard Music Festival in North Carolina, and at the summer vocal institute of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Collier is also organist and choir director at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Scituate, Mass., where she runs an active recital series. She has also been a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, and a participant in the Cleveland Art Song Festival. Collier is active as a collaborative pianist around the country and in Europe.