Collegiate Chorale Announces Expansion of its Executive Staff: Ted Sperling & Edward Barnes

The Collegiate Chorale announces the addition of two new members of the company's executive team. Ted Sperling and Edward Barnes join Music Director James Bagwell and Executive Director Jennifer Collins as Artistic Director and Producing Director, respectively, effective immediately.

The Collegiate Chorale has presented in recent years a number of successful and innovative explorations of opera-in-concert, new music, choral classics and musical theater, often across genres and in collaboration with other organizations and artists. Formalizing The Chorale's fruitful relationship with two such collaborators, The Board and Music Director James Bagwell take great pleasure in announcing the addition of two members to its artistic team-Ted Sperling as its Artistic Director and Edward Barnes as its Producing Director. These appointments demonstrate The Chorale's commitment to innovation, diverse programming, strong production values and music education.

"The Board and Staff of The Collegiate Chorale have decided that an expanded structure for artistic leadership reflecting the full range of The Chorale's programmatic vision best serves the organization moving forward," said George Grumbach, Co-Chair of The Board of Directors. "Ted and Edward have distinguished and varied artistic backgrounds and we are thrilled to have them join our excellent Music Director James Bagwell in charting the course for The Chorale well into the future."

"Ted and Edward have collaborated on six critically acclaimed Chorale productions, including The Mikado, The Grapes of Wrath and Knickerbocker Holiday, among others" said James Bagwell, who will continue in his role as Music Director for The Collegiate Chorale. "I am thrilled by the possibilities for the future as the three of us work together to create dynamic programming for the tastes of a well-informed concert-going public and to expand our education programs to further invest in the next generation of artists and audiences."

"My concerts with The Collegiate Chorale have been among the highlights of my career so far," said Maestro Sperling. "This is a wonderful organization with a rich history, and I'm honored and delighted to be appointed Artistic Director. Working with the terrific team of James, Edward and Jennifer, and with the support of our dedicated and dynamic Board of Directors, I know we have even more exciting and innovative programs in store for our singers and our audiences. I am particularly excited to have the opportunity to return to my classical roots, and look forward to exploring repertoire in all genres, from Baroque to Broadway."

One of today's leading musical artists, Ted Sperling is a director, music director, arranger, orchestrator, conductor, singer, pianist and violinist. Mr. Sperling's projects with The Chorale have included concert performances of The Firebrand of Florence(Conductor, 2009), The Grapes of Wrath (Conductor, 2010), Knickerbocker Holiday(Director, 2011), Something Wonderful: A Broadway Evening with Deborah Voigt(Conductor/Director, 2011), The Mikado (Conductor/Director, 2012) and Song of Norway (Conductor/Director, 2013).

Mr. Sperling comes from a deeply musical family and began his violin and piano studies at the age of five. He attended the pre-college program at The Juilliard School where he received the Faculty Prize on graduation. While majoring in music at Yale, Mr. Sperling was the principal violist in the Yale Symphony for three years, sang in the professional chapel choir, and was countertenor soloist in many concerts with the Bach Society, Glee Club and other groups.

Since moving to New York, Mr. Sperling has distinguished himself in a range of artistic genres and has had an active concert career, working with singers such as Audra McDonald, Victoria Clark, Patti LuPone, Kelli O'Hara, Nathan Gunn, Paulo Szot and Deborah Voigt. He has appeared regularly as conductor of the New York Philharmonic, has performed with most of the major American symphony orchestras, and appeared with the Houston Grand Opera.

Sperling won the 2005 Tony and Drama Desk Awards for his orchestrations of The Light in the Piazza, for which he was also music director. Other Broadway credits include the Tony Award-winning revival of South Pacific, Guys and Dolls, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Full Monty and many others. Mr. Sperling's work as a stage director includes the world premieres of The Other Josh Cohen, See What I Wanna See, andStriking 12, as well as a revival of Lady in the Dark. A winner of the Ted Shen Family Foundation Award for leadership in the musical theater, Mr. Sperling is a consultant for The Public Theater and creative director of the 24- Hour Musicals.

Edward Barnes commented that "I have always been attracted by The Chorale's original productions of diverse master works and I am thrilled to be a part of a team so firmly committed to developing a new generation of audience members".

Mr. Barnes, a talented composer, musician and producer, first collaborated with The Chorale in 2003 and since then has produced a number of highly successful programs with the organization including concert versions of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikadoand Ricky Ian Gordon and Michael Korie's opera, The Grapes of Wrath, at Carnegie Hall, as well as the concert and live cast recording (Sh-K-Boom/Ghostlight Records) of Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson's Knickerbocker Holiday at Lincoln Center. Additional producing credits include Tracy Letts' play Superior Donuts on Broadway,You Are Here for NyLon Fusion Collective, A Christmas Carol for Night Kitchen Radio Theater/XM Satellite Radio, and several theatrical productions at the Teatro Maipu and Paseo La Plaza in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

A graduate of the Juilliard School, Mr. Barnes first came to national attention at the age of 22 when his first opera, Feathertop, was produced in New York by the American Opera Center and he became the youngest composer ever to win a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a founding director of The Metro Ensemble, a Los Angeles based musical theater troupe, and was most recently the Managing Director of American Lyric Theater in New York City.

Edward is the recipient of a NY Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and the Stephen Sondheim Award for the creation of innovative musical theater. His work has been produced by the American Repertory Theater, Lincoln Center Theater, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Seattle Opera, Virginia Opera, San Diego Opera, Opera Company of the Philippines, Minnesota Opera and Michigan Opera Theater, among others.

The mission of The Collegiate Chorale is to enrich audiences through innovative programming and exceptional performances of a broad range of music that features choral singing. Founded in 1941 by the legendary conductor Robert Shaw, The Chorale has established a preeminent reputation for its interpretations of the traditional choral repertoire, vocal works by American composers, and rarely heard operas-in-concert, as well as for commissions and premieres of new works by today's most exciting creative artists. A few of the guest artists with whom The Chorale has performed in recent years include: Jamie Barton, Stephanie Blythe, Victoria Clark, Nathan Gunn, Thomas Hampson, Angela Meade, Kelli O'Hara, Eric Owens, René Pape, Bryn Terfel and Deborah Voigt. Last season's highlights included 13 concerts with the Israel Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta and Riccardo Muti in Israel, Salzburg and New York, the critically acclaimed concert presentation of Bellini's Beatrice di Tenda, NY premieres of works by Philip Glass and Osvaldo Golijov, and three performances of Dallapiccola's Il Prigioniero with the NY Philharmonic and Alan Gilbert. In addition to The Chorale's presentations, the chorus performed in three programs during the American Symphony Orchestra's 2012-13 season, and returned for its sixth appearance at the Verbier (Switzerland) Festival in the summer of 2013 performing under the baton of Maestros Charles Dutoit, Christian Zacharias and Valery Gergiev.

In recent years The Chorale has expanded and strengthened its very successful Side-by-Side music education program for young student-artists in New York's public schools. The organization is committed to broadening the scope of its educational programming to include a greater number of young students, to achieve a broader reach into New York's diverse communities and to seek out ways to engage adults in various types of educational outreach and programming.