Neal Goren

Neal Goren

Conductor

Neal GorenConductor Neal Goren was the founder and Artistic Director of Gotham Chamber Opera, which popularized and legitimized the formerly ignored genre of chamber opera, which has now attained respect equal to the pillars of the of the operatic repertoire. For Gotham, Goren conducted 27 productions, which included the world premieres by Nico Muhly’s Dark Sisters and Lembit Beecher’s I Have No Stories to Tell You; and the U.S. stage premieres of works by Kaija Saariaho, Toshio Hosokowa, Bohuslav Martinu, and Xavier Montsalvatge. Gotham’s production often featured unexpected elements, such as site-specific presentations in locales thematically related to the operas, such as Cavalli’s Eliogabalo presented in the Box, a louche Manhattan night club; Haydn’s Il mondo della luna, presented in the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History; and Daniel Catan’s La hija de Rappaccini, presented in the Rose Garden of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and the Greystone Manor Gardens in Beverly Hills, CA. Other Gotham productions were staged by directors known for their work in other artistic genres, such as choreographers Mark Morris, Karole Armitage, David Parsons, and Luca Veggetti; Broadway directors Moisès Kaufman and Rebecca Taichman, and puppeteer Basil Twist. Goren’s other conducting credits include Die Zauberflöte for New York City Opera and the Trentino Festival, Dark Sisters by Nico Muhly (European premiere) for the Trentino Music Festival and for Opera Philadelphia; Transformations by Conrad Susa, for San Francisco Opera Center; Mila by Eli Marshall (world premiere) for Asia Society of Hong Kong; and Anaïs Nin and Odysseus’ Women by Louis Andriessen (U.S. premiere) for Center for Contemporary Opera.  He is currently on the faculty at the Mannes School of Music in New York.