Bio
Of Lithuanian heritage, composer Veronika Krausas was born in Australia raised in Canada, and lives in Los Angeles. She has directed, composed for, and produced multi-media events that incorporate her works with dance, acrobatics and video. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) writes “her works, whose organic, lyrical sense of storytelling are supported by a rigid formal elegance, give her audiences a sense that nature’s frozen objects are springing to life.”
Recently she was one of 6 composers involved in the acclaimed mobile opera Hopscotch. Alex Ross of the New Yorker said of Hopscotch, “a remarkable experimental opera”. Her first opera The Mortal Thoughts of Lady Macbeth, based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, was premiered at the New York City Opera’s VOX 2008 festival. It was staged and won both the Best Opera and Best Performance with soprano Michelle Jasso at Goat Hall Productions Works for Opera (San Francisco – 2009). A full production was mounted in Los Angeles in August 2010 to sold-out audiences. Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times said of her chamber opera “Something novel this way comes.”
Commissions and performances include the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Ensemble musikFabrik, Esprit Orchestra, The Vancouver Symphony, ERGO Projects, Continuum Music, Toca Loca, Fort Worth Opera, and Motion Music. In 2009 the Penderecki String Quartet gave the US Premiere of midaregami, her work for string quartet and mezzo-soprano, at REDCAT Theater in Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles. It received repeat performances in 2015 at USC in a multi-media event with films by Mike Patterson, Candace Reckinger, David Lynch and Agnes Varda and in Canada at the Perimeter Institute.
Language of the Birds, a commission for the 25th Anniversary of the San Francisco Choral Artists with the Alexander String Quartet, using text by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, premiered in May 2011 in San Francisco. It was released on CD by Foghorn Classics with Ferlinghetti reciting his poetry. Her chamber orchestra work analemma was an official selection of the US for the 2012 World Music Days in Belgium and will have a Lithuanian premiere in Vilnius in 2015 with Vykintas Baltakis conducting. She was the featured composer at the 2013 Céret Music Festival. In 2008 Krausas organized a concert and CD release for The Player Piano Project, a collection of works for player piano by 22 composers from 6 countries.
Sillages for four double basses premiered on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Chamber Series in 2014 and on the Jacaranda concert series in March 2015. In 2016 the LA Phil commissioned Porcupine for 5 double basses inside a tent created by artist Ana Prvacki that premiered during the LA Phil’s Noon to Midnight New Music Festival in 2016. Stephen Vanhauwert commissioned and premiered her new piano études at RedCat in June as part of the Piano Spheres series and Gloria Cheng commissioned a piece for harpsichord for her Piano Spheres concert. This work is now published by Bellmann Musik (Germany). Her solo piano pieces UN-intermezzi have been released by Grammy-nominated pianist Aron Kallay and were performed in Paris by Suzana Bartal and at the Palaces of the President of Malta by Tricia Dawn Williams.
Krausas has music composition degrees from the University of Toronto, McGill University in Montreal, and a doctorate from the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is a Professor in the Composition Department. She is a lecturer and interviewer at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, serves on the advisory council of Jacaranda and People Inside Electronics, and is an associate artist with The Industry.
List of Works
Selected Works
The Mortal Thoughts of Lady Macbeth (2001/2010)z — Chamber opera
Hopscotch (2015) — The Industry’s first mobile opera in Los Angeles. Chapters 15, 17, 18, 25
les reflets du chapeau claque de la lune (the glints of the moon’s opera hat) (1996) — full orchestra
concerto for piano and orchestra (2000)
analemma for 11 musicians (2006) — chamber orchestra
spirals (1995) — chamber orchestra
jeux des vents (2012) — wind symphony
midaregami (tangled hair) (2006) — string quartet and mezzo-soprano
mnemosyne (1999) — quartet (violin, clarinet, bass, percussion OR alternate: horn, clarinet, bass, percussion)
un-intermezzi for solo piano (2012)
The Alchemist’s Suite (2013) — solo baritone with film by Quintan Ana Wikswo
wilderness/rêve du Canada for solo horn and narrator (2009) — solo horn and narrator, text by André Alexis
Waterland (1990/2010) — Electronic with text by André Alexis, film by Quintan Ana Wikswo
Double Bass Music
porcupine (2016) — bass quintet in tent designed by Ana Prvacki
sillages (2013) — bass quartet
gardens of stone (1998) — double bass trio
cloisonné (2005) — for solo bass with film by Nana Tchitchoua
stone (1991) — solo bass with text by André Alexis