Meet Geoffrey Pope, BCSO Guest Conductor for November Concert!
Meet Geoffrey Pope, guest conductor of the first concert of our 70th Beach Cities Symphony Orchestra season and the first of four guest conductors, as we seek our new maestro after Barry Brisk retired last year from his 25-year long tenure at the helm.
Geoffrey Pope has been recognized through numerous appointments and commissions as a conductor and composer throughout the United States and Europe. Winner of the prestigious Walter Hagen Conducting Prize at the Eastman School of Music, he is the Founder and Music Director of the Émigré Composers Orchestra, a new professional ensemble dedicated to performing works of exiled composers who fled to Los Angeles in the 1930s and ‘40s.
An active conductor of contemporary music and opera, Dr. Pope has recently conducted John Adams’ Son of Chamber Symphony for the composer at UCLA’s symposium Inside the (G)Earbox: John Adams @ 70; the first English-language production of Sweeney Todd in Budapest; Opera UCLA’s production of Così fan tutte; the première of Jason Barabba’s Lettere da Triggiano oratorio with members of the Los Angeles Master Chorale; and doctoral lecture-recital featuring his own music and that of Wagner and Bernard Herrmann. Earlier work include leading performances of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with the Experimental Playground Ensemble throughout the Denver Metropolitan Area.
At Eastman, Dr. Pope prepared ensembles for eminent conductors Brad Lubman, Jeffrey Milarsky, and Alan Pierson, in addition to working with resident composers Oliver Knussen, Steven Stucky, Hilary Tann, and Tristan Murail. His scholarly interests include Viennese music of the early twentieth century, and the role of diegetic music in the evolution of sonic spatialization in concert and film music. His dissertation addresses the evolving role of instrumental music written to be performed onstage in German language opera, and the coordination issues involved in its execution and synchronization with the orchestra pit. His recordings have been published internationally, and his work has also been featured on radio stations including Classical KUSC, Colorado Public Radio, and Southern California Public Radio. He was a 2013 American Prize awardee for his chamber orchestra work Votive. His current compositional project is an opera, Sarajevo Vespers, set in Bosnia in 1993.
Dr. Pope received his undergraduate degree in composition and theory from the University of Southern California, master’s degrees in conducting and composition from the Eastman School of Music, and his doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he led ensembles including the UCLA Symphony. He was recently a
sabbatical replacement professor at the UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts, conducting the UCI Symphony Orchestra and Opera. For more information about Dr. Geoffrey Pope and his work, visit his website.