Brian Current
Composer
Brian Current is the composer of Missing, a chamber opera with libretto by Marie Clements, co-commissioned and co-produced by City Opera Vancouver and Pacific Opera Victoria. The opera premièred in November 2017, in Vancouver and Victoria, and will be remounted in 2019 in Victoria, Regina, and Prince George.
Brian Current studied music at McGill University and UC Berkeley. His music, lauded and broadcast in over 35 countries, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barlow Prize for Orchestral Music (USA), the Italian Premio Fedora for Chamber Opera, the Azrieli Commissioning Prize, the Grand Prize in the CBC National Competition for Young Composers and The Selected Work (under 30) at the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. His opera Airline Icarus won the 2015 Juno Award for Classical Composition of the Year.
Brian’s pieces have been programmed by all major symphony orchestras in Canada and by dozens of professional orchestras, ensembles and opera companies world-wide. HIs work includes commissions by the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra, Montreal Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (as winner of the Azrieli Prize), Toronto Symphony Orchestra, National Youth Orchestra of Canada, Soundstreams Canada, Gryphon Trio, St. Lawrence String Quartet, and others.
Current is also an in-demand guest conductor and regularly leads orchestral programs of contemporary music. He has championed nearly one hundred works by Canadian composers. Brian has been the main conductor of the Continuum Ensemble since 2011 and has guest conducted with symphony orchestras and ensembles in Canada, the USA and Italy. Starting in 2019-2020 he is co-director of New Music Concerts (NMC) of Toronto. Since 2007 Dr. Current has been director of the New Music Ensemble of the Glenn School at The Royal Conservatory.
The power of Missing’s libretto is magnified by the equally spare music of … composer Brian Current, whose sublime score – conducted here by Timothy Long – soars and plummets in unison with the fierce complexity of emotions that are brought to bear through the telling of this tragic tale.
Roberta Staley, The Whole Note. Review of Missing, City Opera Vancouver / Pacific Opera Victoria, 2017.