Masterclass | Timothy Long, piano & vocal coach

Timothy Long is a pianist and conductor of Muscogee Creek and Choctaw descent who is Music Director of Opera at Eastman School of Music.

After working on Thomas Adès’s operatic tour-de-force Powder Her Face at the Aspen Music Festival, Tim was appointed by Robert Spano to be his assistant conductor for three years at the Brooklyn Philharmonic. He was subsequently named an associate conductor at the New York City Opera for two seasons.

His early training as a pianist and violinist led to work with singers, and eventually to conducting engagements that have included companies such as Boston Lyric Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, Opera Colorado, Utah Opera, Tulsa Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Pacific Opera Victoria, Shreveport Opera, The New Group, The Juilliard School, Yale Opera, Stony Brook Opera, the Maryland Opera Studio, the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, the Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra, the Oregon Bach Festival Orchestra, and the Prague Summer Nights Festival Orchestra.

Tim has performed as a pianist and harpsichordist at venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, the Kennedy Center, National Sawdust, Jordan Hall, Wigmore Hall in London, the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, Herkules Hall in Munich, Dvorak Hall in Prague, La Halle aux Grains in Toulouse, the Mostly Modern Festival, the Moab Music Festival, the Hawaii Performing Arts Festival, the Oregon Bach Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, the Caramoor Festival, and the Dame Myra Hess Series in Chicago, among many others. As a concerto soloist he has performed with the Oklahoma Symphony Orchestra, the Lawton Philharmonic, the Beethoven Society Orchestra of Washington DC, the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute Orchestra, the Sociedad Filarmonica de Conciertos of Mexico City, the Eastman School Symphony Orchestra, and the Eastman Philharmonia.

Tim conducted the world premiere of Missing, an important new opera by Marie Clements and Brian Current about the 3,000 missing Indigenous women in Canada, at City Opera Vancouver and Pacific Opera Victoria in 2017. Other recent performances include the Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra with the great dramatic soprano Christine Goerke, Tulsa Opera’s 70th Anniversary Gala starring famed mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, Die Zauberflöte and Le Nozze di Figaro at the Prague Summer Nights Festival, Don Giovanni and Ricky Ian Gordon’s Tibetan Book of the Dead at the Eastman Opera Theatre, a rock concert with the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, and an experimental theatre piece, Dream Seminar, with the Trondheim Sinfonietta in Norway.

This season, he will conduct a tour of Missing with Pacific Opera Victoria, the Regina Symphony Orchestra, and the Prince George Symphony Orchestra. At Eastman Opera Theatre he will lead Salieri’s Prima la musica e poi le parole, Mozart’s The Impresario, and Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. Additionally, he will play concerts in Rochester, New York City, and Boston, and will make returns to the Mostly Modern Festival and the Prague Summer Nights Festival.

Naxos recently released Tim’s recording of the Dominick Argento song cycles, The Andrée Expedition and From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, with the internationally renowned baritone Brian Mulligan. This recording has been highly lauded, with Opera News stating that he “provides masterfully sculpted renditions of the varied and challenging piano parts, which range from spare and crystalline (evoking the icy North) to rolling and transcendent.” Previous recordings include The Music Teacher (Bridge Records) and the Opera America Songbook. Upcoming releases include performances on an album of the Music of Sheila Silver (Albany Records).

Tim has taught at The Juilliard School, the Yale School of Music, and SUNY-Stony Brook, and is currently an Associate Professor at Eastman School of Music. He lives in Brooklyn and Rochester with his husband, baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert, and their sweet basset hound mix, Pumpkin.