Mexican-American Countertenor Rodolfo Girón has been described as being a “Moving performer with…a lush and delicate timbre”.

He is currently working with Beth Morrison Projects and Vision Into Art on the creation and premiere of Paola Prestini’s The Old Man and the Sea, also starring Nathan Gunn and Measha Brueggergosman-Lee. He has worked closely with Prestini and director Karmina Šilec on the creation of the role of Manolin.

Mr. Girón also is a part of Musica Viva NY. Later this season, he will perform as a soloist in Golijov’s Oceana and Mozart’s Requiem.

Past performances with this group include the Alto soloist in Bach’s Magnificat, Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium, Mozart’s Vesperae solennes de confessore, Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil, and Vivaldi’s Gloria. He has also sung the solo, Joel Thompson’s thoughtful and moving Seven Last Words of the Unarmed. He has also programmed, planned, and performed in numerous outreach programs in partnership with the Bronx, NYPL Branches for children of all ages.

Recent credits include The Dallas Opera’s production of Flight by Jonathan Dove, where he covered the role of the Refugee. Other roles include the debuts as Melanto in Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria, Ottone in L’incoronazione di Poppea, Ruggiero in Alcina, and El Alma in Juana

He was a Semi-Finalist in Fort Worth Opera’s McCammon Voice Competition. He was also scheduled to make his Debut with Opera Delaware and Baltimore Concert Opera in their production of L’incoronazione di Poppea as Nerone.

He also joined Des Moines Metro Opera as an apprentice artist. He there again covered John Holiday in the role of Refugee in their production of Flight.

In the spring of 2017, Mr. Girón joined the experimental electronic music group Swarmius. He has performed with the group during the 2017 New West Electronic Arts and Music Organization Festival, and has upcoming performances with them in New York and San Diego.

Highlights from Mr. Girón’s past seasons include Arsamene in Pittsburgh Festival Opera’s production of Serse, and the role of Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Janeic Opera Company. While with Janeic Opera Company, Mr. Girón had the opportunity to be a soloist in Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music, under the baton of Keith Lockhart.

Mr. Giron often works on contemporary works that focus on an array of social issues. He is currently working with San Diego City Opera to create St. Francis de los Barrios. This opera focuses on the AIDS crisis that is happening in modern-day Tijuana, and is an adaptation of the St. Francis tale.

This past summer he developed the role of Blood in a new jazz/opera hybrid, A Gathering of Sons. This work was commissioned by Pittsburgh Festival Opera. The piece centers around the current racial tensions that are present in America. In Boston, Mr. Girón had the privilege of creating the role of Iphis in the opera, The Body Politic. In this work, Iphis is a transgender man from Afghanistan who tries to make a new home in America. He premiered this work with Juventas New Music Ensemble. He has also worked with many different composers to create new song cycles and theatrical works.

Mr. Girón has performed in many concert works. These include singing St. Cleofe in Handel’s La Resurrezione, the alto soloist in Bach’s St. John Passion, the alto soloist in Mozart’s Requiem, and the alto soloist in Messiah.

Mr. Girón received his Bachelor of Arts Degree in Music and Theatre from Pepperdine University. He received his Master’s of Music in Opera Performance at The Boston Conservatory at Berklee.

Chinese-Australian soprano Yvette Keong is a unique performer who is passionate about the ability of classical music to enliven modern society by centralizing voices that need to be heard.

Hailed as a “soaring soprano” of “clarity and promise” (Opera News) and as “one of the most exciting songstresses in the world” (Cut Common Magazine), Ms. Keong is a dynamic artist of opera, art song, concert, and contemporary repertoire. She recently made her solo recital debuts with the Carnegie Hall Citywide series and Opera Maine. This season sees her company debut leading as La Virgen del Cobre in Paola Prestini’s The Old Man and the Sea with Beth Morrison Projects at ASU Gammage and Carolina Performing Arts, and her recital debut at Merkin Hall with Classic Lyric Arts. This summer, she was a voice fellow at the Ravinia Steans Music Institute, performing in recitals curated by Kevin Murphy and Graham Johnson and in masterclasses with Ailyn Perez.

Other recent highlights include Third Prize at The Gerda Lissner Foundation Lieder & Song Competition, First Place winner at the John Alexander Opera Mississippi Vocal Competition, the Opera Australia Prize, and Merenda Legacy Prize at the IFAC Handa Australian Singing Competition, and her debut with Annapolis Opera as Clorinda in La Cenerentola. She was previously a resident artist at the Marlboro Music Festival, alongside Mitsuko Uchida, Jennifer Johnson Cano, and Jonathan Biss.

Her deep passion for bringing forth necessary voices in opera have seen her leading in several premieres of new works, including as Iris Chang in Shuying Li’s opera When the Purple Mountains Burn in workshop at the Houston Grand Opera, La Virgen del Cobre in Paola Prestini’s The Old Man and the Sea with Beth Morrison Projects, and Hideko in Bora Yoon’s opera Handmaiden at Princeton University. She made her National Sawdust debut with Beth Morrison Projects in 21c Liederabend: Op. Senses, an interactive recital of living women composers. Ms. Keong led the creation of And Is Renewed, a recital program of all living female composers centred upon feminine creation and resilience, which premiered as part of the Women Now Festival with EXTENSITY Concert Series.

She is a recipient of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship, the only musician of her year to be awarded the prize and the first singer in a decade. Ms. Keong was an inaugural Renée Fleming Artist at the Aspen Music Festival, where she made her festival debut as the soprano soloist of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 and sang as Papagena in Die Zauberflöte under the baton of Patrick Summers. She participated in SongStudio at Carnegie Hall led by Renée Fleming. She was the recipient of the Rohatyn Great Promise Award at the Eastern Region of the Metropolitan Opera Competition and has won accolades from the James Toland Vocal Arts Competition and Opera Index Competition.

During her time at The Juilliard School, Ms. Keong performed as Adina in L’elisir d’amore, under the baton of Joseph Colaneri. She also performed as Henrietta M. in Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All, in a co-production by the New York Philharmonic, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Juilliard School. Previous role credits with Juilliard Opera include Musetta in La bohème and Despina in Così fan tutte. She made her Alice Tully Hall debut performing Rachmaninoff’s 6 Romances, Op. 38. Ms. Keong was a voice fellow at Music Academy of the West, where her roles included Katie and Ada in the West Coast premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain. She also sang as the soprano soloist of Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 at Hahn Hall.

Ms. Keong made her Carnegie Hall concert debut as a soprano soloist of Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music at Stern Auditorium under the baton of Leonard Slatkin. Previous operatic roles include Miss Wordsworth in Albert Herring, Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, and Phoebe in Scott Eyerly’s The House of Seven Gables at the Manhattan School of Music. Ms. Keong has been featured in Warren Jones’ Singers and Pianists recitals and performed as the soprano soloist of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 2 Lobgesang under the baton of Kent Tritle. She is an alumna of the Houston Grand Opera Young Artist Vocal Academy.

Ms. Keong completed her Master of Music at The Juilliard School, where she is the proud recipient of the Novick Career Advancement Grant. She completed her Bachelor of Music at the Manhattan School of Music, where she received the honorary Hugh Ross Commencement Award upon graduation, awarded to an outstanding singer of unusual promise. Ms. Keong is also a committed educator and arts advocate, joining the Operation Opera Festival at Gonzaga University as an artist-in-residence, leading the Gluck Community Service Fellowship during her time at Juilliard, and maintaining an avid teaching studio across the USA and Australia.

Beyond her accomplishments as a singer within the operatic and concert realms, Ms. Keong also trained for over a decade as a ballerina with the Royal Academy of Dance and as a pianist with the Australian Music Examination Board. In her spare time, she enjoys painting and drawing for loved ones (Love from Yvette), eating sushi, reading romantic fiction, and tarot reading.

Composer Paola Prestini has cultivated a uniquely expansive and humanistic musical voice, through pieces that transcend genre and discipline, and projects whose global impact reverberates beyond the walls of the concert hall. Far more than just notes on a page, Prestini’s works give voice to those whom society has silenced, and offer a platform for the causes that are most vital to us all. Prestini has been named one of the Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music by the Washington Post, one of the top 100 Composers in the World by National Public Radio, and one of the Top 30 Professionals of the Year by Musical America. As Co-Founder of National Sawdust, she has collaborated with luminaries like poet Robin Coste Lewis, visual artists Julie Mehretu and Nick Cave, and musical legends David Byrne, Philip Glass and Renée Fleming, and her works have been performed throughout the world with leading institutions like the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Dallas Opera, London’s Barbican Center, Mexico’s Bellas Artes, and many more.

Royce Vavrek is a Canada-born, Brooklyn-based librettist and lyricist who has been called “the indie Hofmannsthal” (The New Yorker) a “Metastasio of the downtown opera scene” (The Washington Post), “an exemplary creator of operatic prose” (The New York Times), and “one of the most celebrated and sought after librettists in the world” (CBC Radio).  His opera “Angel’s Bone” with composer Du Yun was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

With composer Missy Mazzoli he wrote “Song from the Uproar,” premiered by Beth Morrison Projects in 2012, and subsequently seen in multiple presentations around the country. Their second opera, an adaptation of Lars von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves,” premiered at Opera Philadelphia, co-commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects, and directed by James Darrah to critical acclaim in September of 2016. The work won the 2017 Music Critics Association of North America award for Best New Opera and was nominated for Best World Premiere at the 2017 International Opera Awards.  A new production premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in the summer of 2019, produced by Scottish Opera and Opera Ventures, helmed by Tony Award-winning director Tom Morris and earned star Sydney Mancasola a coveted Herald Angel Award for her performance.  Their next opera, an adaptation of Karen Russell’s short story “Proving Up,” was commissioned and presented by Washington National Opera, Opera Omaha and The Miller Theatre in 2018, was a finalist for the MCANA Best New Opera Award of that year.  They are currently developing a grand opera for Opera Philadelphia and the Norwegian National Opera based on an original story by two-time Governor General’s Award-winning playwright Jordan Tannahill, as well as an adaptation of George Saunders’ Booker Prize-winning novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” for The Metropolitan Opera.

Teaming up with Swedish composer Mikael Karlsson, Royce wrote the story and text for two dance projects, “Crypto,” choreographed by Guillaume Côté for Côté Dance and “Evidence of It All,” choreographed by Drew Jacoby for SFDanceworks, featuring narration by the Academy Award-nominated actress Rosamund Pike. They are currently developing two grand operas: an adaptation of Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” to premiere at the Royal Swedish Opera in 2023, and “Fanny and Alexander,” working alongside creative partner Ingmar Bergman, Jr. to musicalize his late father’s classic film for La Monnaie de Munt in 2024, in a production to be directed by Ivo van Hove. Both operas are to feature renowned mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, for whom Mikael and Royce wrote the song cycle “So We Will Vanish,” premiered by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra in 2021 to critical acclaim.

His collaboration with composer David T. Little led Heidi Waleson of the Wall Street Journal to proclaim them “one of the most exciting composer-librettist teams working in opera today.”  In April of 2016 they premiered their first grand opera, “JFK,” at Fort Worth Opera, a co-commission with American Lyric Theater and Opéra de Montréal that was called “ravishing” (Opera News), earning a ten-star review in Opera Now Magazine.  This followed the success of their first opera, “Dog Days,” which received its world premiere in September of 2012 at Peak Performances @ Montclair, in a production co-produced by Beth Morrison Projects and directed by American maverick Robert Woodruff.  The work was celebrated as the Classical Music Event of the year by Time Out New York and a standout opera of recent decades by The New York Times.  They are currently developing an original work for the Metropolitan Opera through the Met/LCT commissioning program.

Royce has also worked extensively with composer Paola Prestini, first on the song cycle “Yoani,” inspired by the blog posts of Yoani Sanchez, and then on “The Hubble Cantata,” a virtual reality oratorio produced by VisionIntoArt/National Sawdust in association with Beth Morrison Projects. They recently presented the workshop premiere of “Silent Light,” an opera based on the Cannes Jury Prize-winning film by Carlos Reygadas at the Banff Centre for Creativity, a collaboration with the director Thaddeus Strassberger, and are currently working on a new opera inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” They are also developing “Film Stills,” a project for mezzo-soprano Eve Gigliotti that dramatizes four of Cindy Sherman’s iconic photographs through musical monologues composed by Paola, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly and Ellen Reid, and directed by R.B. Schlather.  Royce and Paola’s collaboration can be further heard on the AIDS Quilt Songbook: Sing for Hope recording, where their song “Union,” as sung by Isabel Leonard, is featured.

In 2014 Royce premiered “27,” his first collaboration with composer Ricky Ian Gordon, at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.  Created for renowned mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, the work brought to life Gertrude Stein’s famous salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris.  Mark Ray Rinaldi of the Denver Post wrote that the opera “tells a great American story, about Gertrude Stein, as well as opera in the 21st century.”  The opera was subsequently presented by Pittsburgh Opera, MasterVoices at New York City Center, Michigan Opera Theater, Opéra de Montréal and Opera Las Vegas.  In 2017 their adaptation of Gail Rock’s Christmas classic “The House Without a Christmas Tree” for Houston Grand Opera was premiered to critical acclaim.

Other recent and upcoming projects include “Strip Mall” with Matt Marks for the Los Angeles Philharmonic; “Epistle Mass” with Julian Wachner for Trinity Wall Street, “Midwestern Gothic” with Josh Schmidt for Signature Theatre, Virginia; “Naamah’s Ark” with Marisa Michelson for MasterVoices; “O Columbia” with Gregory Spears for HGOco; “Knoxville: Summer of 2015” with Ellen Reid for the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and National Sawdust; “The Wild Beast of the Bungalow” with Rachel Peters for Oberlin Conservatory; “Jacqueline” with Luna Pearl Woolf for Tapestry New Opera; “Adoration” (based on the film by Atom Egoyan) with Mary Kouyoumdjian for Beth Morrison Projects; “The Cremation of Sam McGee” with Matthew Ricketts, supported by a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts; and “My Family // Cambodia, 1975” with Vivian Fung, which will be given a developmental workshop by the Canadian Opera Company in 2025.

Royce is the Artistic Director of Toronto’s experimental opera company Against the Grain Theatre.  He holds a BFA in Filmmaking and Creative Writing from Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Montreal and an MFA from the Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program at New York University.  He is an alum of American Lyric Theater’s Composer Librettist Development Program.