Prism Opera
Thomas
Stumpf, born in Shanghai in 1950, received his degrees in piano performance
from the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, and the New England Conservatory of
Music in Boston. He won concerto competitions at both institutions, and was
awarded the Bûsendorfer Prize (Vienna, 1970) and the Lilli Lehmann Medal (Salzburg,
1972). His performing career has taken him across four continents. He has performed
with sopranos Rita Streich, Edith Mathis, Karen Beardsle, mezzos Hanna Ludwig
and D'Anna Fortunato, clarinettists Richard Stoltzman and Jack Brymer, saxophonist
Kenneth Radnofsky, flautists Claude Monteux and Robert Stallman, violinists
Yuri and Dana Mazurkevich and Arturo Delmoni, violists Walter Trampler and Michael
Zaretsky, and cellist Leslie Parnas. He has also appeared with the Hong Kong
Philharmonic, the Boston Pops Orchestra (under Arthur Fiedler) and numerous
other ensembles.
Thomas Stumpf is co-founder of Prism Opera, which under his direction has performed Mozart's The Magic Flute (in Stumpf's own translation), Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors, Barber's Vanessa, Britten's The Rape of Lucretia and The Turn of the Screw. He has given numerous recitals with soprano Joan Heller, including two in Moscow and two in St. Petersburg in 1990, and recorded a song-cycle by Irwin Bazelon with her for the Albany label. In 1995 the CD "On the Verge" was released on the Neuma label, which includes a performance by Ms Heller and Mr. Stumpf of his composition "Lear's Daughters" as well as of a song-cycle by Charles Fussell. - He has also performed regularly with soprano Jean Danton, including two recitals in New York in 1994, and they collaborated on the CD "Songs of Innocence" for the Albany label. Their second CD, "American Dreamer," was released in December 1998. She premiered Stumpf's song-cycle "Little Girl Lost."
Stumpf's
repertoire ranges from Bach to the avant-garde. He has conducted several Mozart
concerti from the keyboard, and performed the complete solo piano works of Mozart
at Boston University during the 1991-92 season. He has premiered many compositions
by contemporary American composers, including those written specifically for
him by W. Thomas McKinley,
Thomas Oboe Lee, William Moylan, and Robert Ceely, whose Piano Variations he
recorded on the BE EP label. His own compositions have begun to appear on concert
programs in Boston, throughout the U.S. as well as in Germany and the U.S.S.R.;
in 1992 he won the Kahn Award for his music theater project "Dark Lady."
He is Director of Music at Follen Church in Lexington MA, where he has conducted the Mozart Requiem, the Bach Magnificat, Dvorak's Mass in D and Respighi's "Laud to the Nativity." Stumpf also has a distinguished career as teacher and lecturer. From 1979 to 1984 he taught at the New England Conservatory; from 1984 to 1990 he was head of the Piano Department at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell; from 1990 to 1997 he was Chair of the Collaborative Piano Department at Boston University. He has regularly given master-classes in the summer at the B.U. Tanglewood Institute, in Mannheim, Germany, and at the Montanea Festival in Switzerland.