Singers/Production Team

Tonya Currier, soprano
Soprano Tonya Currier made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2000 as the featured soloist for the Durufle Requiem. She went on to sing with the Milwaukee, Augusta, Mansfield, Lake Forest and Greenville symphony orchestras. She has performed the role of Dorabella in Chicago Lyric Opera Center’s production of Cosi fan tutte, a role she has also performed with Opera Carolina, Piedmont Opera, Central City Opera and the Academy of Vocal Arts. Other recent performances include Angelina in La Cenerentola with Mississippi Opera and Florentine Opera, Rosina in The Barber of Seville with Connecticut Opera Theater, and the title role in Carmen with the South Carolina Opera Theater. She is a graduate of the New England Conservatory, and a Mid-Atlantic regional winner of the NATSSA Competition for Singers. Upcoming engagements include selections from Der Rosenkavalier with the Metro Chamber Orchestra, NYC and the Brahms Requiem with the Augusta Symphony.

Rachele Gilmore, soprano
Coloratura Soprano Rachele Gilmore is a young singer with a silvery timbre and dynamic stage presence. Rachele began the 2007 season making her Carnegie Hall debut singing Mozart’s Coronation Mass. She continued the season in Paris as a participant in Placido Domingo’s prestigious Operalia Competition where she was chosen as a Zarzuela winner, a Finalist in the Opera Division and sang in the final concert at Théâtre Châtelet under the baton of Maestro Domingo. In the latter part of the summer she returned to Italy for her second summer with Opera Ischia to sing the role of Suzanna in Le Nozze di Figaro and went on to sing Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Orlando Opera. In 2008 she will join Indianpolis Opera to sing Olympia in Les Contes d’Hoffman.

Deanne Meek, mezzo-soprano
This season mezzo-soprano Deanne Meek will reprise her acclaimed performed of Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream both in France and on tour in Athens. She returns to both Utah Opera for Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni and Opera North for Meg Page in Falstaff, as well as to the Teatro Real in Madrid as Kristina in The Makropulous Case. Among Ms. Meek’s other recent engagements is her return to the English National Opera for Ruggiero in Alcina, Dorabella in Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte at Opéra National du Rhin and Rossweisse in Die Walküre at the Châtelet in Paris. A frequent presence on the stage of the New York City Opera, she has appeared as Cherubino in Le Nozze di Figaro, Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Hänsel in Hänsel und Gretel and Diana in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, and Harriet Mosher in the New York premiere of Tobias Picker’s Emmeline. An active recitalist, Ms. Meek has sung solo recitals in the United Kingdom, Paris, New York, Baltimore, Washington D.C., St. Louis and the Pacific Northwest.

Thomas Conlin, Conductor
Thomas Conlin is a regular guest conductor with symphony orchestras, ballet companies and opera companies on five continents, most recently in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, Egypt, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Turkey and throughout the United States. Many of Conlin’s programs feature works by Barber, Bernstein, Copland, Gershwin and other fellow Americans, and he is a champion of music of our time, but his international career includes conducting Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov in Russia, Beethoven and Brahms in Germany, Mozart and Mahler in Austria, Debussy and Ravel in France, Verdi and Puccini in Italy, Grieg in Norway and Sibelius in Finland. Last season he led the Eastern European premiere of Bernstein’s West Side Story at the National Opera of Croatia, in Zagreb.  

Maestro Conlin’s recording of George Crumb’s Star-Child, on which he conducts the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, won the 2001 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. His music video, Symphonic Wonderworks, won the Gold Award (1st Prize) at the 1992 Houston International Film Festival and was nominated for a Telly Award. His CD of Crumb’s A Haunted Landscape was nominated for an Indie Award as Best Orchestral Recording of 2002, and his latest CD on the Bridge label, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Echoes of Time and the River, was released in 2004 to great acclaim. The first in a series of recordings of works by the Brazilian composer Camargo Guarnieri was released on the Naxos label last Year.

Conlin has collaborated in opera and concert with renowned vocalists Kathleen Battle, Marilyn Horne, Robert Merrill, Sherrill Milnes, Roberta Peters, Giorgio Tozzi and Frederica von Stade, in ballet with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Edward Villella and Violette Verdi, and with instrumentalists Emanuel Ax, Alicia de Larrocha, James Galway, Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and Isaac Stern. For Toledo Opera he has conducted recent productions of Romeo and Juliet, Don Pasquale, The Turn of the Screw, La traviata, Sweeney Todd, Don Giovanni, La bohème, The Crucible, The Barber of Seville, Faust, Madama Butterfly, Pagliacci, Amahl and the Night Visitors, The Marriage of Figaro, Tosca and Così fan tutte and six of TO’s Opera Galas: Three Tenors! – the Next Generation, A Night in Old Vienna, The Greatest Wagner Concert Ever!, Opera Goes to the Movies, From Russia with Love and From Broadway to the Met.