MADAME WHITE SNAKEMADAME WHITE SNAKE

Zhou Long (b. July 8, 1953, Beijing) is internationally recognized for creating a unique body of music that brings together the aesthetic concepts and musical elements of East and West. Deeply grounded in the entire spectrum of his Chinese heritage, including folk, philosophical, and spiritual ideals, he is a pioneer in transferring the idiomatic sounds and techniques of ancient Chinese musical traditions to modern Western instruments and ensembles. His creative vision has resulted in a new music that stretches Western instruments eastward and Chinese instruments westward, achieving an exciting and fertile common ground.

Zhou Long was born into an artistic family and began piano lessons at an early age. During the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to a rural state farm, where the bleak landscape with roaring winds and ferocious wild fires made a profound and lasting impression. He resumed his musical training in 1973, studying composition, music theory, and conducting, as well as Chinese traditional music. In 1977, he enrolled in the first composition class at the reopened Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Following graduation in 1983, he was appointed composer-in-residence with the National Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra of China. Zhou Long travelled to the United States in 1985 under a fellowship to attend Columbia University, where he studied with Chou Wen-Chung, Mario Davidovsky, and George Edwards, receiving a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in 1993. After more than a decade as music director of Music from China in New York City, he received ASCAP’s prestigious Adventurous Programming Award in 1999.

He has been the recipient of commissions from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, Chamber Music America, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Among the ensembles who have commissioned works from him, are the Bavarian Orchestra (Poems from Tang), the Tokyo Philharmonic (The Future of Fire), the New Music Consort (The Ineffable), the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble (Soul and Tian Ling), the Peabody Trio (Spirit of Chimes), and the Kronos, Shanghai, Ciompi, and Chester string quartets (Poems from Tang). In February 2010, his pioneering cross-cultural opera, Madam White Snake, which was premiered by Opera Boston, received great critical acclaim. It was given a second performance in Beijing on the 27-October 2010 by the Bejing Philharmonic Orchestra.

Cerise Lim Jacobs forges new American opera from her past in multicultural Singapore, her sojourns around the world, and her acute awareness of the social issues of our time, creating original libretti that range from the mythological to the topical. With her husband Charles, she conceived of and wrote the libretti for her first large-scale project, Ouroboros Trilogy, comprising Scott Wheeler’s Naga, Paola Prestini’s Gilgamesh, and Zhou Long’s Madame White Snake, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Music. The complete Ouroboros Trilogy premiered in Boston in September 2016.

After the success of Ouroboros Trilogy, Jacobs transformed the fundraising entity Friends of Madame White Snake into the “activist opera company” White Snake Projects, which commissions, develops and produces original opera committed both to the highest production values and to social activism. Following the trilogy, her astonishing output of an opera a year saw premieres of her REV. 23, a satirical take on life after the prophesied Apocalypse, composed by Julian Wachner; PermaDeath, one of the world’s first video game operas, composed by Dan Visconti; and I Am A Dreamer Who No Longer Dreams, a wrenching story about immigration composed by Jorge Sosa.

With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jacobs and White Snake Projects nimbly pivoted to online production, investing in new industry-transforming technology and taking risks that a larger company could not have tolerated. Their first digital opera, Alice in the Pandemic, again composed by Sosa, was called “wildly imaginative, musically powerful and technically courageous” by Opera News, while the Boston Musical Intelligencer found that it set “a new standard that is undeniably contemporary, accessible, immersive, and relevant.” Alice in the Pandemic was subsequently acquired by the Library of Congress for its Performing Arts COVID-19 Response Collection. The digital opera Death By Life, premiering in May 2021, explores systemic racism and long-term incarceration using texts by incarcerated writers and their families.

Born into a traditional Chinese family in Singapore while it was under British rule, Jacobs grew up absorbing the disparate influences of Chinese, Malay, Indian and Western cultures. Following studies at the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard Law School, her two-decade law career included serving as a trial partner at one of the largest law firms in New England and spending five years as a federal prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston. Since retiring from law, Jacobs has returned to her creative voice in opera, music, art, and food. She is the President of the Charles and Cerise Jacobs Charitable Foundation and has endowed the Charles M. Jacobs Fund for Equal Rights and Social Engagement at the University of Chicago Law School and College. She is a co-founder, with her son Pirate Epstein, of the mobile gaming company SqueePlay; and a founding member of Evidox, an e-discovery company.

Jacobs was named a 2017 Mover & Shaper by Musical America, and one of Boston’s 100 Most Influential People of Color by the Boston Globe in 2018.

Michael Counts is a 20-year pioneer of immersive entertainment, creating large-scale installations, theatrical productions and innovative media and entertainment experiences, often in unconventional spaces throughout the world. He was hailed as a “mad genius” by the New York Times and “one of the most fertile imaginations working in New York theater today” by Time Out New York. The NY Times wrote an extensive profile chronicling his recent work and projects. His clients include Michael Kors, MetLife, Amgen, The Walking Dead and The Baltimore Orioles to name a few.

Lan Shui is renowned for his abilities as an orchestral builder and for his passion in commissioning, premiering and recording new works by leading composers from Asia and elsewhere on the international contemporary orchestral scene. Having recently assumed the position of Principal Guest Conductor of the Taiwan Symphony Orchestra, 2021/22 sees Shui continuing to guest conduct eminent orchestras in both Asia and Europe.

Lan Shui served as the Music Director of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra from 1997 to 2019, with American Record Review noting that Shui “turned a good regional orchestra into a world-class ensemble that plays its heart out at every concert.” Together they made several acclaimed tours to Europe, Asia and the United States and appeared for the first time at the BBC Proms in September 2014. As of January 2019, Shui has been appointed SSO’s Conductor Laureate. Lan Shui also held the position of Chief Conductor of the Copenhagen Phil from 2007 to 2015, currently serving as the orchestra’s Honorary Conductor.

As a guest conductor, Shui has worked with many orchestras worldwide. In the United States he has appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and Baltimore and Detroit symphony orchestras. In Europe he has performed with Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, hr-Sinfonieorchester, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR, Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, Gothenburg Symphony, Orchestre National de France and Orchestre National de Lille. In Asia he has conducted the Hong Kong, Malaysian and Japan Philharmonic orchestras and maintains a close relationship with the China Philharmonic and Shanghai Symphony.

Lan Shui is the recipient of several international awards from the Beijing Arts Festival and the New York Tcherepnin Society, the 37th Besançon Conductors’ Competition in France and Boston University (Distinguished Alumni Award) as well as the Cultural Medallion - Singapore’s highest accolade in the arts.

Born in Hangzhou, China, Shui studied composition at the Shanghai Conservatory and graduated from The Beijing Central Conservatory. He continued his graduate studies at Boston University while at the same time working closely with Leonard Bernstein at the Tanglewood Music Festival. He has worked together with David Zinman as Conducting Affiliate of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, as Associate Conductor to Neeme Järvi at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and with Kurt Masur at the New York Philharmonic and Pierre Boulez at The Cleveland Orchestra.