Collection: Karchin, Louis

Karchin’s first opera, Romulus, received its premiere in May of 2007, at the Guggenheim Museum’s Peter B. Lewis Theatre and is now available on a much-heralded 2011 Naxos release. His second opera, Jane Eyre, based on the Charlotte Brontë novel, was premiered by the Center for Contemporary Opera in New York in October, 2016, with soprano Jennifer Zetlan and tenor Ryan MacPherson in starring roles, and is now available on a critically acclaimed Naxos double-CD with the original cast, the Orchestra of the League of Composers, and the composer conducting.  Performing and sponsoring organizations championing Mr. Karchin’s music have included the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Tanglewood, Carnegie Hall, the Louisville Orchestra, The Fort Worth Opera (TX), the Da Capo Chamber Players (NYC), the Plurimo Ensemble (Venice, Italy), Spectrum Sonori (Seoul, South Korea), the Delta Ensemble (Amsterdam, Holland), Earplay (San Francisco, CA), Voices of Change (Dallas, TX), the New York New Music Ensemble, and the Portland (ME) Symphony. Soloists have included Lucy Shelton, Fred Sherry, Rolf Schulte, Stephen Gosling, Steven Beck, Miranda Cuckson, Thomas Meglioranza, and Marilyn Nonken, among many others. His music is published by C. F. Peters Corporation and the American Composers Alliance. CDs of his works are available on Bridge, Naxos, New World, Albany and New Focus labels. Mr. Karchin has been Composer-in-Residence at the Composers Conference at Wellesley College, Indiana University, the University of Buffalo, the University of Iowa, and the University of Utah, and he has presented master classes at Harvard, Columbia, Boston, Brandeis, Cleveland State, and Rutgers Universities, as well as the Juilliard School, Westminster Choir College, the Manhattan School of Music, Mannes College, and Queens College, CUNY. In 2010, he was a guest composer at the Etchings Festival in Auvillar, France.

As a conductor, Mr. Karchin is Music Director of the Orchestra of the League of Composers, and with them has conducted New York or world premieres of works by Elliott Carter, Joan Tower, Charles Wuorinen, David Rakowski, Arthur Kreiger, Missy Mazzoli, Julia Wolfe, and Milton Babbitt, among many others. He is also a conductor of the Washington Square Ensemble and the Chamber Players of the League–ISCM.

Mr. Karchin lives in Short Hills, NJ, with his wife, Julie Sirota Karchin, and their daughters, Marisa and Lindsay.