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Faculty artist Denyce Graves is among the distinguished artists, administrators, and advocates named to OPERA America’s 2025 Opera Hall of Fame nominees. Created in 2020, the Opera Hall of Fame recognizes the achievements of outstanding Americans and Canadians who have strengthened the art form and field. Graves and the 2025 class of honorees will be inducted at the OPERA America Salutes awards dinner in March 2026.
Peabody’s Vocal Studies department also celebrates Tess Ottinger (MM ’20, Vocal Studies) and Marjorie Sheiman (MM ’24, Vocal Studies), who won first and second place in the Advanced Treble category at the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) 2025 National Student Auditions.
| | More news about Peabody alumni, faculty, and students can be found below and online. Please keep sending us your news: career achievements, fellowships awarded, competitions and prizes won, commissions earned, albums released, and whatever else you’re currently pursuing. | | | |
I hope everyone is continuing to enjoy a productive and pleasant summer.
In 2015 Peabody launched its first Breakthrough Plan and, then, continued the progress made under that initiative with the launch in 2019 of Peabody’s Breakthrough Plan 2024. When Peabody began formulating its next strategic plan in early 2024, it did so with the view that much had been accomplished through the previous two incarnations of the “Breakthrough,” including the launch of new programs, significant enrollment growth, new innovations in curriculum, investments in faculty, and more.
Fast forward to the launch of our current plan, Building on the Breakthrough, in December 2024, built on the foundation of having garnered major new investments in financial aid, as well as plans to undertake comprehensive capital renovations as part of Peabody’s next phase of growth and development. Building on the Breakthrough highlights five key areas, including academic programming, financial aid, expanding our reach, people and culture, and our home—the Mount Vernon campus.
A strategic plan is only as useful as the attention paid to it as a living, breathing document and roadmap for an institution. That means holding ourselves accountable for the goals we have set forth and being transparent as to progress on goals throughout the trajectory of the plan. Our sights need to be set high, but our eyes focused on the details that will determine success. With that in mind, this summer we completed the first inventory and update on each of the 25 goals that comprise this plan. I want to invite all that are interested to go to Building on the Breakthrough to learn more about progress on plan initiatives.
That’s it for now as we all prepare for and look forward to the launch of the 2025-26 academic year.
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Saturday, August 9, 7:30 pm MDT
The Utah Symphony summers at scenic Park City venues surrounded by the Wasatch Mountains for its Deer Valley Music Festival, such as the Snow Park Outdoor Amphitheater—where Jessica Altarriba (MM ’24, Conducting), assistant conductor for the Utah Symphony and Utah Opera, leads the symphony through its summer season closer: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, complete with a battalion of cannons during the rousing finale. Tickets are available online.
Wednesday, August 13, 7:30 pm CDT
The Baroque Orchestra Apollo’s Fire performs a program inspired by the 18th-century tradition of instrumentalists facing off in friendly yet lively displays of skill. The concert showcases Alan Choo (MM ’14, Violin, Early Music; GPD ’16, Violin) in several works featuring pairs of soloists, including Movement I from Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto Grosso in D major, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, and Vivaldi’s La Folia after Trio Sonata in D minor. The concert takes place at the Ravinia Festival’s Martin Theatre and tickets are available online.
Thursday and Saturday, August 14 and 16, 8:00 pm CEST
Faculty artist and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts set 24 of Emily Dickinson’s indelibly alive poems to music for Emily – No Prisoner Be, a new song cycle commissioned by the Bregenz Festival in Austria. Soprano Joyce DiDonato and the genre-defying string trio Time for Three perform the world premiere of Emily on the festival’s Werkstattbühne stage. Tickets are available online.
Thursday, August 14, 7:30 pm EDT
The Berkshire Opera Festival commemorates its tenth season in Western Massachusetts with a celebratory concert featuring artists from previous and upcoming seasons in addition to its 2025 season musicians. Mezzo-soprano Natalie Jane Turner (MM ’25, Vocal Studies) joins the company as a chorus member for the 10th Anniversary Concert August 14 as well as its production of Guiseppe Verdi’s La Traviata August 23, 26, and 29. All performances take place at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington, and tickets are available online.
Wednesday, August 27, 7:00 pm EDT
Detroit’s Dance City Festival stages its first event in New York City with a full day of intensive master classes followed by two nights of performance with the Choreographers Showcase. Dance artist and choreographer Micah Shapiro (BFA ’25, Dance) is one of the 15 dance artists/companies presenting works during the showcase, with faculty artist Kelly Hirina performing. The performances start at 7:00 pm at Dixon Place in downtown Manhattan and tickets are available online.
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Peabody Notes highlights select off-campus performances featuring Peabody performers. For other events, please visit our Peabody events page.
| | | | Sara Brown (MA ’12, Audio Sciences: Recording and Production) was recently promoted to Audio Operator II at ESPN, having served for more than three years as Audio Operator I, responsible for sound quality during live and taped programming. She is based at ESPN’s studio facilities in Bristol, CT. | | | | Jonathan Hugendubler (MM ’16, DMA ’21, Composition), a Baltimore-based music educator and trivia host, unseated a 16-day champion on the season finale of the television game show Jeopardy! in July, winning $23,601 in the process. | | | | Jazz faculty artist Allison Miller joins the Board of Directors for the Jazz Education Network, the Chicago-based nonprofit organization dedicated to building the jazz community. Miller, drummer for the adventurous ARTEMIS quintet (named 2025 Mid-Size Ensemble of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association), will also be the 2025-26 Ken Pullig Visiting Scholar in Jazz Studies at the Berklee College of Music. | | | | Tyrone Page, Natalie Pretzello | Natalie Pretzello (MM ’21, Music Education) and Tyrone Page (BM ’16, MM ’18, Saxophone; BM ’16, Music Education) were recognized this year as the Howard County Public School System’s teachers of the year. Page is director of Bands at Oakland Mills Middle School. Pretzello is the band director at Hammond Middle School. | | | | Freelance organist Robert Sacks (BM ’81, Piano) was elected Clerk of Lisle Township, IL, in May, the keeper of all records for the Township. He also serves as organist and pianist at Community Presbyterian Church of Clarendon Hills, appointed to the position in January 2025. He previously served as keyboardist at numerous Chicago-area churches. | | |
La Guitare Aux Mille Sonorités
French-Canadian guitarist Tommy Dupuis (GPD ’25, Guitar), named Radio-Canada’s Revelation of the Year 2025-2026 in May, considers his debut album a spotlight of the many qualities that make the guitar unique and worth celebrating. La Guitare Aux Mille Sonorités features Dupuis performing a wide range of stylistically disarming works, from his own transcription of J. S. Bach’s Partita No. 2, Allemande, and his faculty mentor Manuel Barrueco’s transcription of Isaac Albéniz’ Suite Espanola No. 1, Granada, to Harold Arlen’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Toccata for Guitar,” a work written for Dupuis by his friend and countryman, composer Vincent Pollender. La Guitare Aux Mille Sonorités is available to purchase on Apple Music and stream on YouTube Music.
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Move with Love
Pianist/composer Lafayette Gilchrist and his New Volcanoes band has served Baltimore bars, nightclubs, outdoor festivals, and more luscious meals of funk, soul, go-go, and hip-hop schooled jazz for going on 30 years. Move with Love (Morphius Records), his new album, catches an especially lively Gilchrist and the New Volcanoes show at Baltimore’s Club Car, with tenor saxophonist Ephraim Dorsey (BM ’25, Jazz Studies) and his current undergraduate sister Ebban Dorsey on alto for four of the six tracks—including album closer and standout “Crosspolination Aggregation.” Move with Love is available to purchase or stream online.
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Tapawingo: Original Motion Picture Score
Director/co-writer Dylan K. Narang’s recent comedy Tapawingo follows a 30-year-old slacker (Napolean Dynamite’s Jon Heder) who becomes a low-rent bodyguard for a kid being bullied at school, and composer and music producer Jacob Yoffee (BM ’02, Composition; GPD ’05, Jazz Performance) wrote a genre-defying ride through classic rock, 1980s synth sounds, mariachi, jazz, folk, and more for the soundtrack. For such a genre-hopping score, Yoffee put together a team of studio musicians that included Russel Kirk (BM ’05, Jazz Saxophone). Tapawingo: Original Motion Picture Score is available to purchase or stream online.
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“Les P’tites Choses”
French musician Julien Xuereb (MM ’15, GPD ’17, Guitar) was Peabody’s initial Musician-in-Residence at Springwell Senior Living, and has since continued to provide healing through grant-supported live music at the George Washington Cancer Center in Washington, D.C. He’s also a girl-dad, and he wrote and recorded the playful, uplifting rock-polka-hybrid “Les P’tites Choses” for his daughter, inspired by her boundless imagination. “Les P’tites Choses” is available to stream online.
| | Lifelong Learning Opportunities | |
The Johns Hopkins Alumni Association offers a range of non-credit, personal enrichment courses and workshops taught by alumni and faculty through its Odyssey lifelong learning program, and the Fall 2025 catalog includes two courses taught by Peabody alumni. The virtual Great Comedy Classics, taught by Ernest Liotti (BM ’80, Piano), offers a survey of American film comedies. And Paul Jan Zdunek (BM ’91, Composition) teaches From the Practice Room to the Board Room: Developing & Deploying Your Non-Linear Destiny, a virtual course designed to help professionals identify their unique paths, leverage personal challenges, and turn dreams into strategic actions.
The Odyssey program also offers Alumni Life Design Experience classes and the new Moser Family Writing Series of writing courses, field excursions, and virtual lectures; the full course catalog is available online.
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