JOHN GREER is an active accompanist, vocal coach, arranger,
composer and conductor and is heard in these capacities throughout
Canada and abroad, in recital and on various CBC broadcasts. He is an
honoured music graduate of both the University of Manitoba where he
studied piano and composition with Boyd McDonald and of the University
of Southern California where he was a student of pianists Gwendolyn
Koldofsky and Brooks Smith and harpsichordist Malcolm Hamilton.
As a faculty member of the University of Toronto opera division Mr.
Greer made his conducting debut in 1983. He has conducted numerous
operas there including The Marriage of Figaro, Gianni Schicchi,
Tschaikowsky’s Iolanta and Massenet’s Le Portrait de Manon, as well as
works for Victoria’s Opera Piccola, Ottawa’s Opera Lyra, The Banff School
of Fine Arts, the Toronto Gilbert & Sullivan Society and Mirvish
Productions. He has worked on numerous productions with Opera
(Hamilton) Ontario and the Canadian Opera Company where he was
chorus master for their 1989 productions of Un Ballo in Maschera and Il
Barbiere di Siviglia and assistant conductor for their 1990 production of Suor
Angelica. Mr. Greer has just spent five years as Music Director of the
Eastman Opera Theatre in Rochester, New York where conducting credits
include Le Nozze di Figaro, Candide, Albert Herring, Patience and The Turn of
the Screw and two years as Music Director of the Opera Studio at the
University of Maryland in the fall of 2001. From 2003-10 he was Director
and Chair of Opera Studies at the New England Conservatory in Boston
and made his conducting debut there with The Magic Flute. Other NEC
conducting credits include Massenet’s Cendrillon and Britten’s The Turn of
the Screw. For ten seasons his summers were occupied with his duties as
General Manager and Head of Music Staff for the Janiec Opera Workshop
at the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina where his conducting
credits include A Little Night Music, La Cenerentola, The Mikado, Naughty
Marietta,The Gondoliers, Brigadoon and the world premier of David Liptak’s
chamber opera The Moon-Singer. Mr. Greer has also been on the music staff
of Glimmerglass and Chautauqua Opera companies. He is currently Head
Vocal Coach for the University of Kentucky voice and opera in Lexington,
KY.
Mr. Greer’s compositions include ten song cycles written for
Canadian singers such as Catherine Robbin, Kevin McMillan, Mark
Dubois, Tracy Dahl, Monica Whicher, and Adrianne Pieczonka and
numerous works based on Canadian folk song. He has written two operas
for the Canadian Children’s Opera Chorus, The Snow Queen based on the
Hans Christian Anderson tale with a libretto by Jeremy James Taylor of
Britain’s National Youth Music Theatre, and an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s
fairy tale The Star-Child with librettist Ned Dickens and a revision and
orchestration of the 1889 Canadian operetta Leo the Royal Cadet by O. F.
Telgmann, commissioned by Toronto Operetta Theatre.