Thomas Bagwell
Artburst Performances Include:
An Evening of Kurt Weill
Called by Marilyn Horne, “a pioneer for his age,” Thomas Bagwell served as assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera from 1997-2006. Other long term opera house affiliations include the Washington National Opera and the Santa Fe opera. He has been a participant at the Marlboro Music Festival and has collaborated in recital with such luminaries as Midori, Marilyn Horne, Susan Graham, Frederica von Stade, Denyce Graves and James Morris. His career has taken him to such venues as Carnegie Hall, the Musikverein, the Concertgebouw, Wigmore Hall and many others.
Thomas Bagwell has had a long association with the Austrian Cultural Forum both in New York and Washington DC performing over twenty five recitals of Lieder with up and coming singers from the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera and others. The first project for the ACF in New York was a complete survey of Hugo Wolf’s Lieder, a seven part series which included the participation of twenty-eight singers. Other projects have included a Mahler festival in which his piano four-hand arrangement of “Das Lied von der Erde” was premiered (featuring Kristine Jepson as mezzo soloist), an operetta program with Broadway star Christiane Noll, and most recently a series which combines Schubert Lieder with contemporary American art song. His performances in Washington DC at the Austrian Embassy include three recitals this spring in their Festival of Austrian Song and a lecture on Lieder for the Smithsonian Institute.
Thomas Bagwell has also had a long association with the Marilyn Horne Foundation, performing numerous recitals and galas in New York and this season a national broadcast of the “Saint Paul Sunday” radio program from Minnesota Public Radio. He is also involved with the Lotte Lehmann Foundation and recently joined fellow advisory board member Marni Nixon to record a Schoenberg song for a commemorative CD on the Arabesque label. This coming season, Thomas Bagwell will be involved in a new project with soprano Arisa Kusumi and several guest artist singers called “Art Song Now.” This ensemble will take programs of art song with commentary and spoken poetry to audiences across the country in an effort to revitalize the vocal recital and the understanding of the song literature. Their first concerts have been at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York and at the Poetry Conference at West Chester University
In addition to his performing schedule, Mr. Bagwell is an active teacher in New York and elsewhere. His association with the Mannes College of Music began in 1998 as a vocal coach, then adding classes for singers and now as private teacher of accompanying in their Master’s degree program for Collaborative Piano. He has taught masterclasses in such schools as Portland State University, Simpson College and for the Santa Fe Opera, the New Jersey Opera Theater, the first Astoria Music Festival in Oregon, and will this fall be a guest faculty member for a week at the Conservatorio de Musica de Puerto Rico. His teachers have included Warren Jones, Graham Johnson and Edna Golandsky. New York Magazine critic Peter G. Davis has written of him,” Thomas Bagwell’s bejewelled playing showed that the art of the accompanist is alive and well.”
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