Confrères Productions

 

Confrères Productions is the collaborative partnership among composer David Conte, poet/librettist John Stirling Walker and pianist/conductor Doug Reed.

 

Works to date include:

 

Blessing (hymn) 1996; version for SATB chorus 2007

Elegy for Matthew  (TTBB/chamber orchestra) 1999

      (SATB/chamber orchestra) 2000

      (Solo soprano/chamber orchestra) 2001

The Composer (SATB) 2002

What I See In Your Eyes (jazz ballad) 2001

September Sun (SATB/string orchestra) 2002

The Passion of Rita St. James:

     A Modern Musical Morality Play (chamber opera) 2003

The Right Place at the Right Time (pop crossover song) 2005

Famous (opera) 2006 (in progress)

The Nine Muses (SATB, piano four-hands, percussion) 2007

The Homecoming: In Memoriam Martin Luther King, Jr. (SATB) 2008

Stonewall (opera) 2013

 

All works are published by E. C. Shirmer Music Company, Boston.

Audio MP3 recordings of The Nine Muses and September Sun can be heard at davidconte.net

 

The Elegy for Matthew was commissioned by the New York City Gay Men's Chorus as a memorial to Matthew Shepard, and had its premiere at Carnegie Hall in June of 1999, followed by a performance at the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of Stonewall in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. September Sun was commissioned by St. Bart's Summer Music Festival in Manhattan in memory of the victims of 9/11, and premiered there at the first anniversary of the attacks. The Passion of Rita St. James had its first performance as part of the opera program of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in the spring of 2003. Famous is an adaptation of the autobiography of artist Isabelle Dufresne--lover of Salvador Dali and Superstar UltraViolet in Andy Warhol's Factory--"Famous for Fifteen Minutes: My Years with Andy Warhol."  Excerpts from this work in progress were performed in Manhattan in October 2005 before an invited audience that included prominent representatives of the New York opera and musical theater scene. A full workshop production was given at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in November, 2007. The Nine Muses was commissioned by the American Choral Director's Association (The Brock Commission), and was premiered at their national convention in Miami in March, 2007. The Homecoming was composed for Chanticleer, and was premiered in September, 2008. Stonewall was commissioned by and given its premier at the University of Northern Colorado Opera Theater in 2013.

 

David Conte is professor of composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His close relationships with his teacher Nadia Boulanger and with her first American student of renown, Aaron Copland, informed and inform his striving as a creative artist committed to works that reflect the qualities of craftsmanship and harmonic sensibility Boulanger taught and Copland embodied.

 

John Stirling Walker was mentored by Mr. Conte as an undergraduate at Cornell University, and shared with him a profound gratitude for the influence upon them there of eminent musicologist William W. Austin, whose contributions to the scholarship of twentieth century music are well known, but whose humanity and the quality of whose penetration of spiritual-cultural realities are not yet properly appreciated. Their works together are published by E.C. Schirmer of Boston.

 

Doug Reed has a long resume of Broadway and other musical theater credits, and continued his service to the world of popular spiritual culture in the U.S. tour of Disney's The Lion King until July, 2017.