Craig Smith, 60, Founder and Artistic Director of Boston's Emmanuel Music, has died. Opera News reports that Smith, a frequent collaborator of the late mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, passed away last Wednesday, November 14, in Boston, from complications due to diabetes-related kidney failure. We at Nonesuch offer our heartfelt condolences to Craig Smith's family and colleagues.
Craig Smith, 60, Founder and Artistic Director of Boston's Emmanuel Music, has died. Opera News reports that Smith passed away last Wednesday, November 14, in Boston, from complications due to diabetes-related kidney failure. Opera News writes:
In 1970, Smith, a graduate of New England Conservatory of Music, founded Emmanuel Music to serve as the resident ensemble of Boston’s Emmanuel Church, where he worked as music director. Initially, Smith envisioned the group as a vehicle for the performance of Bach’s complete cantata oeuvre—192 works in total—in a setting similar to what the composer had conceived. From 1970 through 1977, Smith led the ensemble through the entire corpus—the first time all the works had been performed in America—and continued to conduct the Emmanuel each Sunday in a performance of a Bach cantata. Smith led his final cantata, BWV 72, Alles nur nach Gottes Willen, on November 4 ...
In the 1980s, Smith forged a notable collaboration with stage director Peter Sellars and conducted the director’s modernized stagings of Mozart’s Da Ponte trilogy (Così fan Tutte, Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro), Handel’s Giulio Cesare, as well as other works by Bach, Weill, Gilbert & Sullivan, and Gershwin ...
One of Smith’s most frequent and admired collaborators, the late mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson—who started as a violist in Emmanuel Music—collaborated with the conductor in seminal performances of Bach’s cantatas 82 and 199, “Ich habe genug” and “Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut,” which had been adapted for the stage and dramatized by Sellars. Performances of the works traveled to venues in New York, Paris, Amsterdam, London, and Vienna. A 2002 studio album documenting Lieberson’s performances under Smith’s baton was released by Nonesuch Records ...
A memorial service in Smith’s honor is to be held at Boston’s Emmanuel Church at a future date.
We at Nonesuch offer our heartfelt condolences to Craig Smith's family and colleagues.
There is much more on Craig Smith's life and his innumerable contributions to the arts at metoperafamily.org and at emmanuelmusic.org.