Tobias Picker

Tobias Picker (born July 18, 1954) is an American composer, pianist, and conductor, noted for his orchestral works Old and Lost Rivers, Keys To The City, and The Encantadas, as well as his operas Emmeline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, An American Tragedy and Lili Elbe, among many other works.

Picker was born in New York City on July 18, 1954, the son of painter and fashion designer Henriette Simon Picker and news-writer Julian Picker, and the cousin of film executive David V. Picker, businessman Harvey Picker, former CEO of The American Film Institute Jean Picker Firstenberg, art-patron Stanley Picker, filmmaker Jimmy Picker, and economist Kenneth Rogoff. At the age of eight, he began composing and studying the piano:

I was raised by my teachers on a diet of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schuman, and eventually Brahms, my favorite. There was always some "modern" music thrown in.... With the discovery of each new composer a new world opened up for me. It wasn't really until I discovered the music of Charles Wuorinen with whom I began studying at eighteen that I finally was exposed to Carter (with whom I later studied) and Boulez and Stravinsky and Stefan Wolpe.

Picker started composing in 1962, and, that same year, began corresponding with composer Gian Carlo Menotti, who encouraged his studies. Three years later, Picker was taken into the preparatory division of the Juilliard School of Music for instruction in piano and theory. At the age of eighteen, Picker was an improvising pianist for Martha Graham at the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, and, that same year, he enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Charles Wuorinen. After graduating in 1976, he returned to the Juilliard School of Music to take instruction in composition from Elliott Carter and, afterwards, pursued graduate studies at Princeton University with Milton Babbitt.

In 1976, at the age of twenty-two, Picker was commissioned to compose "Sextet No. 3" by Speculum Musicae, which premiered at Alice Tully Hall. Soon after, in 1978, the premiere of Rhapsody for Violin and Piano led New Yorker critic Andrew Porter to deem Picker "a genuine creator with a fertile, unforced vein of invention". By the age of thirty, Picker had been recognized with numerous awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Joseph H. Bearns Prize (Columbia University), a Charles Ives Scholarship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Picker's Symphony No. 1 premiered at the San Francisco Symphony in 1983, and, that same year, Picker was the soloist in his Piano Concerto No. 2: Keys to the City, commissioned by the city of the New York for the Brooklyn Bridge Centennial. Later that year, Picker's "The Encantadas" was premiered by the Albany Symphony Orchestra. In 1985, Picker was appointed the first composer-in-residence of the Houston Symphony where he introduced his most popular orchestral work, Old and Lost Rivers, as well as two symphonies and other concerted works. In 1988, pianist Ellen Masaki premiered his Piano Concerto No. 2: Kilauea, which was commissioned and performed by the Honolulu Symphony. In 1992, Picker was awarded the Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Music.

In 1993, Picker began composing his first opera, Emmeline, commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera, with a libretto by J. D. McClatchy; Emmeline premiered in 1996. In 1998, two years after the debut of Emmeline, Picker's second opera, Fantastic Mr. Fox premiered at the Los Angeles Opera. Fantastic Mr. Fox was recorded by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Odyssey Opera in 2019 and released on Albany Records; this album won the 2020 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording. A consortium of The Dallas Opera, San Diego Opera, and Opéra de Montréal commissioned Picker's third opera, Thérèse Raquin, which debuted in 2001. In 2005, The Metropolitan Opera debuted Picker's fourth opera, An American Tragedy, based on the novel by Theodore Dreiser; a revised version was premiered at The Glimmerglass Festival in 2014.

In 2010, Picker composed a ballet, Awakenings, for the Rambert Dance Company, inspired by the work of Oliver Sacks. That same year, he co-founded Opera San Antonio, where he served as artistic director from 2010 to 2015. In 2012, Picker was elected to a lifetime membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Picker's fifth opera, Dolores Claiborne, based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, premiered at the San Francisco Opera in September 2013; soon after, in 2015, the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis mounted a new production of Emmeline, which garnered positive reviews. Picker was appointed artistic director of Tulsa Opera from 2016 to 2022. His tenure at Tulsa Opera would see the selection of Lucia Lucas as the first transgender opera singer to have a leading role on the American stage (for which she is featured in James Kicklighter's documentary film, The Sound of Identity), a baseball-themed production of Rigoletto adapted for an open-air baseball stadium to accommodate the gathering restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, "Greenwood Overcomes," a concert with new works by African-American composers to honor the memory of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, as well as a Thaddeus Strassberger-directed production of Salome.