The Artistic Director—Stephen Stubbs
Pacific Musicworks was established in 2008 to benefit from the return to Seattle of Stephen Stubbs and to introduce a wide range of musical productions to Seattle audiences with innovative multi-media collaborations.
After a thirty year career in Europe, Stephen Stubbs returned to his native Seattle in 2006 to establish his new opera company, Pacific Musicworks. The company received rave reviews in the national press for its inaugural production of Monteverdi’s Return of Ulysses designed and stage-directed by South African artist William Kentridge with the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa in March 2009. Performances took place in Seattle and for SFMOMA in San Francisco.
The 2009–2010 season includes his direction of a program of Rameau in Versailles with the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, a new production of Handel’s Acis and Galatea in Boston, and a production of Cavalli’s Giasone for the UCLA Opera department. 2011 will bring the American Handel Society to Seattle for the bi-annual Handel Festival at which Stephen will direct Handel’s Esther as well as Handel’s Acis and Galatea imported from the Boston Early Music Festival, for which he is permanent artistic co-director. Since 1997 Stephen has co-directed the bi-annual Boston Early Music Festival opera. The Festival’s recordings of Conradi’s Ariadne, Lully’s Thesée, and Psyché were nominated for Grammy awards in 2005, 2007, and 2009.
Besides his ongoing commitments to the Boston Early Music Festival and Pacific Musicworks, other engagements as music director have taken Stephen to Bilbao’s opera house in Spain to conduct Handel’s Guilio Cesare and Gluck’s Orfeo as well as Handel’s Guilio Cesare in Murcia, Spain. In 2007 he returned to the Netherlands Opera, Amsterdam, where he directed Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, which he has been directing there since 1997. He has also taken an interest in the Passions of J. S. Bach, and he recently conducted the St. John Passion in Bratislava, Slovakia. 2011 will see his debut conducting the Seattle Symphony Orchestra performing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
To cultivate the singers and players of the next generation, Stubbs founded an early opera course called the Accademia d’Amore in 1997, now in Seattle under the auspices of the Seattle Academy of Opera.
The Board of Directors
The Board of Directors brings together a wealth of experience in Seattle’s cultural landscape:
- Bruce Johnson (President)
- Bill McJohn (Treasurer)
- Dr. James Savage (Secretary)
- Mary Ann Hagan
- Greg Kucera
- Douglas Smith