Timothy Long

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Timothy Long is a distinguished conductor, pianist, and composer of Muscogee and Choctaw descent who is Artistic and Music Director of Opera at Eastman School of Music, and an assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera. He is an enrolled citizen of the Muscogee Nation and the Thlopthlocco Tribal Town, and his mother is Choctaw.

At the age of 16, Tim made his piano concerto debut with the Oklahoma Symphony Orchestra, and has since performed as a soloist with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the Lawton (OK) Philharmonic, the Beethoven Society Orchestra of Washington DC, the Sociedad Filarmonica de Conciertos of Mexico City, the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute Orchestra, the Eastman School Symphony Orchestra, and the Eastman Philharmonia.

His work on Thomas Adès’s operatic tour-de-force Powder Her Face at the Aspen Music Festival led to his appointment as assistant conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and he was subsequently named an associate conductor at the New York City Opera.

After early years playing as a violinist in the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, Tim’s passion for symphonic conducting has resulted in engagements with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, the Prince George Symphony, the Regina Symphony, the Eastman Philharmonia, the Prague Summer Nights Orchestra, the Oregon Bach Festival Orchestra, and the Trondheim Sinfonietta. His operatic conducting engagements have included such companies as Boston Lyric Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, Opera Colorado, Utah Opera, Tulsa Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Anchorage Opera, Pacific Opera Victoria, City Opera Vancouver, The Juilliard School, Yale Opera, the New York City Opera, and off-Broadway with The New Group.

At City Opera Vancouver, Tim conducted the 2017 World Premiere of Missing, a groundbreaking new work by Marie Clements and Brian Current about the 5,000 missing Indigenous women in Canada. In 2019, he conducted a Canadian tour of Missing with Pacific Opera Victoria, the Regina Symphony Orchestra, and the Prince George Symphony Orchestra. This extraordinary composition is the first opera to be sung in both the Gitxsan and English languages.

Recent highlights include the World Premiere of How Bright the Sunlight by Anthony Davis and Joy Harjo (Muscogee Nation citizen, 23rd US Poet Laureate) with the Eastman Philharmonia, the American Premiere of Missing for his debut at Anchorage Opera, Handel’s Semele for Wolf Trap Opera, and the In Harmony: Side by Side series with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra at Lincoln Center. This season included Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos: Prologue, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites for Eastman Opera Theatre, and he joined the Metropolitan Opera as an assistant conductor for X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X and for the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program’s Orchestra Workshop,

As a pianist and harpsichordist, Tim has performed throughout the world at venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, the Kennedy Center, National Sawdust, the Kimmel Center, Jordan Hall, Wigmore Hall in London, the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, Herkules Hall in Munich, Dvořák Hall in Prague, La Halle aux Grains in Toulouse, the Oregon Bach Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, the Caramoor Festival, and the Dame Myra Hess Series in Chicago, among many others.

Tim’s recordings include Alburnum, with internationally renowned baritone Brian Mulligan (Bright Shiny Things, 2022), Beauty Intolerable: Songs of Sheila Silver (Albany Records, 2021), the American Classics recording of Dominick Argento song cycles with Brian Mulligan (2017 Naxos), the Opera America Songbook (Opera America, 2012), and The Music Teacher (Bridge Records, 2008), starring Wallace Shawn, Parker Posey, and Elizabeth Berkley. He has appeared on NBC’s Today Show and CBS Sunday Morning.

Tim is passionate about his role as president of The Plimpton Foundation (theplimptonfoundation.org) which promotes the work of Native American and First Nations performing artists through scholarships, grants, and commissions.^[1]

• I’M LAZIER THAN ANY OF YOU: an interview with Timothy Long, Concert Pianist