Dr. Paul Flight, Artistic Director
Noted conductor and countertenor Paul Flight has been Artistic
Director of Chora Nova since its inception in 2006. He is in his
eighth season as principal conductor of the Madison Early Music
Festival (Wisconsin), where he has directed masterworks by Bach,
Telemann, Vivaldi, Purcell, and Francisco Guerrero. Dr. Flight has
twice been a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of
California at Berkeley, directing the University's top choral
ensembles. He conducted the operatic double-bill production of
Gustav Holst’s Savitri and Darius Milhaud’s
Les malheurs d'Orphée
at Mills College, and he has conducted productions of Telemann's Der
geduldige Socrate and Handel's Acis and Galatea for the San Francisco
Early Music Society. He is Artistic Director of two additional Bay
Area ensembles: the California Bach Society which specializes in
historically informed performances of Baroque and Renaissance music,
and The Haydn Singers, a chamber choir he founded in 2005 dedicated
to the performance of music by Haydn, Mozart, and their contemporaries.
Dr. Flight received his doctorate from Indiana University, where he studied conducting with Robert Porco. His research focused on the Venetian composer Giovanni Croce (1557-1609) and he has recorded a program featuring the music of Croce for Harmonia, a nationally syndicated radio show. An articulate musician, he recently appeared as a guest on KALW radio’s performing arts program “My Favorite Things” and has lectured on music history and musical form as a visiting professor at Mills College.
An accomplished countertenor, Dr. Flight performs opera and oratorio internationally. He made his Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra debut under Esa-Pekka Salonen in December 2005 in John Adams’ oratorio El Niño, and has since sung two of the three countertenor roles for, variously, the Norwegian State Opera (Oslo), the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and at the Ravinia Festival (Chicago). In May 2008, he again performed the work at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Closer to home, his portrayal of Philip Glass’ Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaten received glowing reviews from the San Francisco Chronicle. In May 2006 he returned to Los Angeles to sing the US premiere of Unsuk Chin’s Cantatrix Sopranica with the Philharmonic, which he performed in the Bay Area under Kent Nagano last spring. In April of 2008 he made his debut with The Cleveland Orchestra singing the countertenor solo in Bernstein's Chichester Psalms.
Dr. Flight’s interpretations of 18th-century operatic and concert repertoire have also been critically acclaimed: he has sung the title role in Handel’s Solomon, the role of Montezuma in Karl Heinrich Graun’s Montezuma and Dardano in Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula. He performed the Stabat Mater of Vivaldi with the Sacramento Baroque Soloists, and has been a soloist for American Bach Soloists and The San Francisco Bach Choir. A versatile singer, he performed with Sting in his “Songs from the Labyrinth” concerts at Los Angeles’ Disney Hall in January 2007. He sings in many outstanding professional ensembles including Theatre of Voices, The New York Collegium, Aguavà New Music Studio, Piffaro, The Waverly Consort, The Folger Consort, Pomerium Musices, and The Concord Ensemble, an award- winning male sextet. Dr. Flight has recorded for the Dorian, Harmonia Mundi, and Glissando labels.