JOHN GREER is an active vocal coach, accompanist, conductor, arranger and composer 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. His conducting instructors and mentors include James Fraser-Craig, Boris Goldofsky and David Effron.
Mr. Greer has been fortunate to have worked in recital with many of Canada’s most talented young singers of his generation: Nancy Argenta, Tracy Dahl, Rosemarie Landry, Linda McGuire, Kevin McMillan, Mark Pedrotti, Catherine Robbin, and Michael Schade, to name a few, as well as the renowned American singers/teachers Linda Mabbs, Carmen Pelton, Ashley Putnam, Carol Webber and Delores Ziegler.
As a faculty member of the University of Toronto opera division Mr. Greer made his conducting debut in 1983. He has conducted numerous operas thereas 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 has been a coach, chorus master and assistant conductor for the Canadian Opera Company. From 1996-2001, Mr. Greer was the 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. From 2001-03 he served as the Music Director of the Opera Studio at the University of Maryland.
For nine seasons his summers have been occupied with his duties as General Manager and Head of Music Staff for the Janiec Opera Company at the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina where his conducting credits include A Little Night Music, La Cenerentola, The Mikado, The Marriage of Figaro, Sweeney Todd and the world premier of David Liptak’s chamber opera The Moon-Singer. He is currently Director and Chair of Opera Studies at the New England Conservatory in Boston where his conducting credits include The Magic Flute, The Turn of the Screw, Jules Massenet’s Cendrillon, and most recently Così fan tutte to celebrate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Mozart’s birth.
Mr. Greer’s compositions include ten song cycles written for singers such as Catherine Robbin, Kevin McMillan, Mark Dubois, Tracy Dahl, Monica Whicher, and Adrianne Pieczonka and numerous works based on Canadian folk song. His children’s opera The Snow Queen, after Hans Christian Andersen, was written for the Canadian Children’s Opera Chorus and has already had its American and European premiers (Cologne, Amsterdam). Most recently it received its first performance featuring adult singers by The Little Opera Company in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His second opera, also commissioned by the CCOC, was an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale The Star-Child with librettist Ned Dickens. He has also recently revised and orchestrated the 1889 Canadian operetta Leo the Royal Cadet by O. F. Telgmann for a new production commissioned by Toronto Operetta Theatre.