Giselle Wyers and David Alexander Rahbee lead the UW Symphony Orchestra, combined University Choirs and soloists from the UW Voice program in a program of works by Debussy and Brahms, including Debussy’s La Damoiselle Elue and Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem. With Dakota Miller & Gemma Balinbin, mezzo sopranos; Olivia Kerr, soprano; Jacob Herbert, baritone.
Program
Debussy: La Damoiselle Elue
Dakota Miller & Gemma Balinbin, mezzo sopranos
(David Alexander Rahbee, conductor)
Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem, Op. 45
Olivia Kerr, soprano; Jacob Herbert, baritone
(Giselle Wyers, conductor)
Bios
David Alexander Rahbee is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington School of Music, where he is Director of Orchestral Activities and Chair of Orchestral Conducting. He is Music Director and Conductor of the University of Washington Symphony Orchestra and founder of the Campus Philharmonia Orchestras. He is a recipient of the American-Austrian Foundation's 2003 Herbert von Karajan Fellowship for Young Conductors, the 2005 International Richard-Wagner-Verband Stipend, a fellowship the Acanthes Centre in Paris (2007), and is first prize winner in conducting from The American Prize national non-profit competitions in the performing arts for 2020. His work at UW has earned national recognition. In 2021 he was praised by The American Prize as “Consistently one of the most courageous and comprehensive [orchestral] programmers working in higher education in the U.S. today…”
Dr. Rahbee has appeared in concert with orchestras such as the Seattle Symphony, RTE National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, Kammerphilharmonie Berlin-Brandenburg, Guernsey Symphony Orchestra, Chattanooga Symphony, Bellingham Symphony, National Chamber Orchestra of Armenia, Orchestre de la Francophonie, the Boston New Music Initiative, Seattle Modern Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica de Loja, Cool Opera of Norway, Schönbrunner Schloss Orchester and the Divertimento Ensemble of Milan. His collaborations with the Seattle Symphony include assistant conductor for the performance and recording of Ives’ Fourth Symphony, and as guest conductor for their Native Lands project and the North American premiere of Páll Ragnar Pallson's Quake. He has collaborated with several prominent soloists such as Sarah Chang, Michelle Cann, Jon Kimura Parker and Jonathan Biss. He has taught at the Pierre Monteux School, as has conducted at a number of summer festivals such as the Atlantic Music Festival, Sewanee Music Center, Bar Harbor Music Festival and Hawaii Performing Arts Festival.
Dr. Rahbee was an assistant at the Vienna State opera from 2002-2010. As part of his fellowship and residency at the 2003 Salzburg Festival, where he worked with members of the Vienna Philharmonic. Masterclasses with prominent conductors such as Kurt Masur, Sir Colin Davis, Jorma Panula, Zdeněk Mácal, Peter Eötvös, Zoltán Peskó and Helmut Rilling, and counts Nikolaus Harnoncourt to be among his most influential mentors.
Dr. Rahbeeʼs principal conducting teachers were Charles Bruck and Michael Jinbo at the Pierre Monteux School. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree in violin and composition from Indiana University, a Master of Music degree from the New England Conservatory in orchestral conducting, and a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of Montreal in orchestral conducting. He has also participated in post-graduate conducting classes at the Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Vienna. His orchestrations of music by Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Ravel, Debussy and others are published by LeDor; his brass arrangements and an original composition are published by Warwick Music, and his articles on the music of Gustav Mahler have appeared in journals of the International Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft, among others.
In addition to being awarded first prize in conducting from The American Prize for 2020, he was awarded 2nd place in 2019. He has also placed among winners for five consecutive years for The American Prize Vytautas Marijosius Memorial Award for Orchestral Programming, recognizing his programming with the UW Symphony and its affiliated ensembles for every season since he joined the faculty. The UWSO has also been a finalist in the category of orchestral performance in 2018, 2019 and 2020.
Dr. Rahbee is co-editor of Daniels’ Orchestral Music (6thedition) and Daniels’ Orchestral Music Online (DOMO), the gold standard among conductors, orchestral administrators, orchestra librarians as well as other music professionals and students researching for orchestral programming.
Giselle Wyers (she/her/hers) is the Donald E. Petersen Endowed Professor of Choral Music at the University of Washington, where she conducts the award-winning University Chorale and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in choral conducting and music education. She serves as the newly appointed School of Music's designated Diversity Liaison. University Chorale’s latest CD, Chasing Daybreak, will begin streaming in January 2024 on Apple Music and Spotify. Their third CD, Resonant Streams (on the MSR Music Recordings label) was featured in a 2018 Gramophone magazine article. Wyers is the newly appointed director of Concord Chamber Choir, an adult community chorus within the Columbia Choirs community. Her professional project choir Solaris Vocal Ensemble, specializes in the performance of contemporary American choral literature. Their premiere album Floodsongs, on the Albany Music label, won the American Prize Ernst Bacon Memorial Award for the Performance of American Music in 2017-18.
As a guest conductor, Wyers has led high school honor choirs and all-state choruses in New York (Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center), Kansas, Wisconsin, Georgia, Missouri, Louisiana, Connecticut, Nebraska, Texas, Washington, Alaska, Idaho, Nevada and Vancouver, Canada. She has conducted semi-professional ensembles across the United States and in Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, and Sweden.
Wyers is a leading national figure in the application of Laban movement theory for conductors. She has served as guest lecturer in conducting at Sweden’s Örebro Universitet, European Festival of Church Music (Germany), Latvian Academy of Music, Eastman School of Music, Ithaca College, Westminster Choir College, University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Portland State University.
Wyers’ choral works are published by Santa Barbara Music Publishing Company as part of the "Giselle Wyers Choral Series," as well as with MusicSpoke and Hildegard Publishing. Her works have been performed across the United States, South America, Canada, Australia, Cuba, and numerous European cities. She conducted her 30-minute choral cycle entitled And All Shall Be Well, in Carnegie Hall during May of 2022 with a consortium of NW-based choruses, and she will return with a newly composed choral/orchestral work in May of 2026. In 2021-22, she served as composer-in-residence for the Greater Seattle Choral Consortium's annual festivities celebrating the return of in-person singing (her appearance was sponsored by Consortio). Wyers is also committed to mentoring scholar-writers in the field, and served on the editorial board of ACDA’s Choral Journal for six years.