Heavenly Joys

The Durst Début Series artist, award-winning soprano Jennifer Zetlan, has made definitive appearances throughout the country in her young career.  Since graduating from the Juilliard School in 2006, she has made her Metropolitan Opera debut as the 2nd French Actress in War and Peace, her New York City Opera debut as Frasquita in Carmen, and received critical acclaim as Emily in Our Town with the Aspen Music Festival.  Ms. Zetlan was a finalist in the 2007 Palm Beach Opera competition, the Eastern Region third place winner in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 2006, a finalist in the Houston Grand Opera’s 2005 Eleonor McCullom competition, and the 2005 winner of the Mannes College of Music concerto competition.  She recently completed the studio artist program with the Florida Grand Opera, where she performed the roles of Lisa in La sonnambula, 1st Madrigal Singer in Manon Lescaut, and covered Kitty in Anna Karenina.  She has a Bachelor of Music degree from Mannes College of Music and a Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School.

Composer, Trevor Gureckis, who just received his master’s degree in composition at the Yale School of Music, began his musical studies in piano. He attended the University of Texas at Austin (UT) for piano performance on scholarship where he studied with the late Danielle Martin. During his junior year he started taking composition lessons with the faculty at UT, including Kevin Puts and Dan Welcher. He went on to pursue a master’s degree at Yale under the guidance of Martin Bresnick, Aaron J. Kernis, and Ezra Laderman. Since then, Trevor has written music for a variety of mediums including concert, film, theater, ballet, and has had electronic music released by the record label Notenuf Records.

In the summer of 2005, he participated in Cabrillo Music Festival’s Conductor-Composer Workshop, led by Marin Alsop and Gustav Meier. The workshop ended with the premiere of “Color Field from the Rothko Chapel” with the Cabrillo Festival Chamber Orchestra in Santa Cruz, California. That same summer, Trevor was awarded the NFMC Emil and Ruth Beyer Award, which afforded a presentation of his music at the United Nations. In February 2007, he received a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Last October, Trevor’s new orchestral work entitled “Very Large Array”, received its professional orchestra premiere by the Minnesota Orchestra under the direction of Osmo Vänskä as part of the orchestra’s renowned Composer Institute. Trevor is a co-owner and staff composer for Found Objects Music Productions with colleagues Bryan Senti and Jay Wadley, and continues to work with Philip Glass on multiple film music productions at his studio in New York City.