Bio
SARA JOBIN, conductor
Grammy-nominated Sara Jobin has conducted the San Francisco Opera in performances of Tosca, Der fliegende Holländer, Norma, and the world premiere of Philip Glass’ Appomattox, and she led the recent production of Rachel Portman’s The Little Prince for that company. She has also led productions for the San Francisco Opera Center including Transformations, The Bear, Dr. Heidegger’s Fountain of Youth, and Egon und Emilie. Credits elsewhere include another Philip Glass world premiere, The Bacchae, with the New York Shakespeare Festival; Carmen with Anchorage Opera; John Musto’s Volpone with Wolf Trap Opera; Faust, Carmen, La Bohème, Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Le Nozze di Figaro with Tacoma Opera; performances of Der fliegende Holländer with Arizona Opera, and a fire opera version of The Seven Deadly Sins at the Crucible School for Fire Arts in Oakland. Recent orchestral debuts have included Symphony Silicon Valley and the Dayton Philharmonic. Ms. Jobin just finished a successful European debut season conducting the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players at the MANCA Festival in Nice, France and the Bochumer Symphoniker in Germany. This past season she led several new American operas including the world premiere of The Secret Agent in New York with the Center for Contemporary Opera, and new music concerts in San Francisco and Houston. She debuts with the Little Orchestra Society in 2011/2012.
Ms. Jobin’s first full recording, the comic American opera Volpone by John Musto, was nominated for a GRAMMY Award this year. Her recording with Frederica von Stade of the world premiere River of Song by Chris Brubeck can be heard on Convergence on the Koch label; both recordings are available on Amazon.com, iTunes, and cdbaby.com.
At age 16 Ms. Jobin attended Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, where she was a Leonard Bernstein Music Scholar. After graduation, as a John Knowles Paine Travelling Fellow, she studied conducting with Charles Bruck at the Pierre Monteux School. In 1999 she was the first recipient of the JoAnn Falletta Award from The Women’s Philharmonic, and in 2004 she had the honor of making history as the first woman to conduct mainstage subscription performances at San Francisco Opera. The Solti Foundation acknowledged her with a Special Grant in 2006, and she was a Visiting Artist at Harvard in 2008.
Not one to fit neatly into categories, Sara Jobin has a black belt in judo, and was the 1998 and 2006 National Champion and 1999 World Master Athlete Champion in Ju-no-kata. Since 2001 she has been a member of the Glide Ensemble, a gospel choir featured in the movie The Pursuit of Happiness.
October 2011
Biography
KMI
