Malcolm is the youngest and first Black Music Director of the NYC-based The Dessoff Choirs, which is currently celebrating its 97th season with a concentration on African-American composer Margaret Bonds, a significant figure in the fight for civil rights. Malcolm leads the choir in its Metropolitan Museum of Art debut this month followed by the New York orchestral premiere of Bonds’ Credo in Spring 2022.
    
Malcolm shares with us the fascinating story of how he discovered Bonds’ work and his long journey to realizing her piece “The Ballad of the Brown King” in a well-received recording. We also discuss how he balances his twin careers of singing and conducting, and his work with “Voices of Haiti,” a children’s choir in Port-Au-Prince.

Podcast 084: Conductor Malcolm J. Merriweather

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Letters That You Will Not Get: Women’s Voices from the Great War at AOP and Quamino’s Map at Chicago Opera Theater are both operas that opened recently whose creators we have interviewed in previous episodes; Hamlet at the Met is also examined.
    
We delve into diversity and inclusion efforts in the opera world, and why the word “outreach” is no longer helpful for opera companies and symphonies. Ashley Renee gives her perspective on how Lincoln Center is slowly becoming the open campus and community resource it was originally meant to be.

Podcast 091: Roundtable, Opera and Community

The show features all the composer/librettist teams to receive the 2020 OPERA America Discovery Grants which support composers who identify as women in the development of new operatic works and the advancement of their careers in the opera industry.
    
Justine Chen, composer, and Stephanie Fleischman, librettist, talk about delving into Justine’s multifaceted Taiwanese family history for Seven Sisters, which follows the form of a formal Taiwanese funeral. Melissa Dunphy and Jacqueline Goldfinger, composer and librettist, share the macabre origin of Alice Tierney: an unsolved 1880 murder in Philadelphia on Melissa’s property, and discuss the novel way they are choosing to tell the story. Kirsten Volness, Susan Werbe, and Kate Holland, composer and librettists of Letters That You Will Not Get: Women’s Voices from the Great War, discuss the work’s fascinating journey from song cycle to opera, and how they set to music the real-life accounts of multiple women on all sides of the conflict who lived through World War I.

Podcast 090: 2020 OPERA America Discovery Grants Part 2

The Indie Opera Podcast is releasing an episode which was recorded in the Spring of 2020 that got derailed during the start of the pandemic, and features all the composer/librettist teams to receive the 2020 OPERA America Discovery Grants which support composers who identify as women in the development of new operatic works and the advancement of their careers in the opera industry.
    
We are joined by composers Lisa Bielawa, Mary D. Watkins, Milica Paranosic, Johanny Novarro; librettists Claire Solomon, Cheri Magid, and Jose Felix Gomez; and producer Martha Richards. There are lots of music and video highlights in this long-delayed episode, and we include updates on all the projects that they have been creating since the start of the pandemic.

Podcast 089: 2020 OPERA America Discovery Grants Part 1

Joining us are Librettist and playwright Deborah Brevoort, conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson, dramaturg Cori Ellison, and director Kimille Howard discuss the origins and creative process of this unique production, which focuses on the Black Americans who fought for their liberty on the side of the British in the Revolutionary War and struggled to survive in London afterward.
    
We also learn about the Black gentry in London at the time and how it may have intersected with the newly-arrived soldiers. Don’t miss this surprising look into the research, staging, and craft that went into bringing an important but little-known historical moment to light.

Podcast 088: Quamino's Map with Deborah Brevoort, Kimille Howard, Jeri Lynne Johnson and Cori Ellison

Carla Lucero is the first Latinx and female composer to be commissioned by LA Opera. We discover how they translated the opera into Spanish while retaining the same poetic meter, as Lucero will produce the opera in English as well.

We also discuss the significance of the Stations of the Cross, on which the opera is based, as well as why Lucero chose three anonymous women in the 8th station to be the heroines of the story. She also makes a fascinating choice on how to personify Jesus in the opera.

The massive production will be at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels and will feature 3 orchestras and 3 choirs. We can’t wait to see this love letter to LA, which fuses ideas from queer, Latinx, and borderlands cultures into an uplifting whole.

Podcast 084: Conductor Malcolm J. Merriweather

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