Artist Biographies

Vinay Parameswaran

guest conductor

Internationally recognised for his energetic presence, imaginative programming, and compelling musicianship, Vinay Parameswaran is one of the most exciting and versatile young conductors on the podium today.

Highlights of the 2022/23 season include Parameswaran’s debut with the Charlotte Symphony and return appearances with the Nashville Symphony and Rochester Philharmonic orchestras. He also conducts a series of education concerts with the Chicago Symphony. In the 2021/22 season, Parameswaran concluded five seasons with the Cleveland Orchestra, where he was Assistant Conductor from 2018/19 and promoted to Associate Conductor in 2021. During this period, he conducted many concerts each season at Severance Hall, Blossom Music Festival, and on tour. As Music Director, he led the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra on an acclaimed four-city European tour that included a performance at the Musikverein in Vienna.

Prior to his time with the Cleveland Orchestra, Parameswaran was the Associate Conductor of the Nashville Symphony for three seasons and led over 150 performances, which included his subscription debut with the Orchestra in 2016/17, conducting works by Gabriella Smith, Grieg, and Prokofiev. Other highlights have included debuts with the Pittsburgh Symphony, Detroit Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, Louisville Orchestra, North Carolina Symphony, Grant Park Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony, and Jacksonville Symphony.

Equally at home in symphonic and operatic repertoire, and in the recording studio, Parameswaran has led performances of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love with Curtis Opera Theater. In Cleveland, he has assisted Franz Welser-Möst on productions of Verdi’s Otello, Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos. With the Curtis Ensemble 20/21 and violinists Jaime Laredo and Jennifer

Koh, Parameswaran recorded the album Two x Four, featuring works by Bach, David Ludwig, Philip Glass, and Anna Clyne. In 2020/21, Parameswaran recorded a selection of concerts with the Cleveland Orchestra for the Orchestra’s digital streaming platform.

Parameswaran was a Conducting Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, and has participated in conducting masterclasses with David Zinman at the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, as well as with Marin Alsop and Gustav Meier at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. Parameswaran was a recipient of a Career Assistance Award by the Solti Foundation U.S. in May 2021.

A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Parameswaran graduated with honours from Brown University with a Bachelor of Arts in music and political science. At Brown, he began his conducting studies with Paul Phillips. He received an Artist Diploma in conducting from the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with renowned pedagogue Otto-Werner Mueller as the Albert M. Greenfield Fellow.

Alexandra Smither

soprano

An adventurous performer and one of the CBC’s 2017 “30 Young Hot Classical Musicians Under 30”, Canadian soprano Alexandra Smither is a fresh fixture on the worldwide stage. Her “sunny, cloudless top” and “silky, light, soprano” are an organic fit in staple repertoire of Mozart and Monteverdi. Ms. Smither’s signature rapport with new music shows her as “an extraordinarily adept soprano, one who can shriek, gurgle, cackle, mutter, gesture, and declaim as well as sing beautifully” (The Threepenny Blog). During the 2021-2022 season, Ms. Smither sings Iphigenia #1 in Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding’s new opera Iphigenia at MASSMoCA, ArtsEmerson, The Kennedy Center, Cal Performances at UC Berkeley, and The Broad Stage in Los Angeles as well as her debut with California Symphony as the soloist in Katherine Balch’s Illuminate and a return to Ars Lyrica to sing Belinda in Dido and Aeneas.

Ms. Smither’s 2020-2021 season saw her debut with Tapestry Opera in a workshop of Brian Current and Liza Balkan’s Gould’s Wall. A welcome presence at Houston Grand Opera, she covered all seven von Trapp children in their spring 2021 event, My Favorite Things: Songs from The Sound of Music.

In 2019, Ms. Smither debuted with the Boston Symphony, and earned rave reviews in her role debut as Susanna in Against the Grain Theatre’s contemporary adaptation of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Figaro’s Wedding.

In recent seasons, Ms. Smither has cemented her place as an interpreter and champion of even the most intricate new music scores. In 2018 she made her New York debut at the Baryshnikov Arts Centre, performing Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III to enthusiastic reviews. Her impactful 2017 debut with Houston Grand Opera as Younger Alyce in Tom Cipullo’s Glory Denied, was followed by her return to HGO as Diana in their acclaimed mariachi opera, Cruzar la cara de la Luna. Ms. Smither is a two-time Fellow at the Tanglewood Festival, where she debuted at Seiji Ozawa Hall for Schubert’s

“Der Hirt auf dem Felsen” with Emanuel Ax and Bill Hudgins; her time at Tanglewood also included Berg’s Sieben frühe Lieder, Oliver Knussen’s Where the Wild Things Are, the world premiere of Theo Chandler’s “Two Taylor Songs”, and performances under the batons of John Harbison and Thomas Adès. In 2017, Ms. Smither was the Grand Prize winner at the Eckhardt-Gramatté Competition, earning wins for first prize and the prize for best performance of the year’s commissioned work, “Malfunctionlieder” by Canadian composer and turntablist Nicole Lizée.

When she’s not singing, Ms. Smither is a volunteer for West Street Recovery, a non-profit organization working to rebuild homes damaged by disasters, and an organizer with Stop TxDOT I-45, which opposes the expansion of Houston’s I-45 freeway.