Composer

Sound Designer

HARAWI realizes Olivier Messiaen’s deeply affecting, hour-long song cycle for voice and piano in new physical and dramatic dimensions, featuring soprano Julia Bullock, pianist Conor Hanick, choreographer/dancers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, with direction by Zack Winokur. Moving from duet to quartet, this production breaks open Messiaen’s cycle, connects movement to music, and grapples with the intensity of love and loss.

EPSG:4326

Harawi California Tour

 University of California, Santa Barbara

Cal Performances

The Walls Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

The Comet / Poppea brings together seemingly disparate worlds connected by stories of cultural transformation. The work juxtaposes Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea), an Italian opera from 1643 unfolding among the social divisions of ancient Rome; and the world premiere of The Comet, based on the 1924 science-fiction short story by sociologist and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Set in 1920s New York City, “The Comet” depicts a Black man and white woman as the only survivors after a comet hits Earth.

The Comet / Poppea

Museum of Contemporary Art

The vibrant and eclectic style of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams is paired with biblical verse, modern Spanish-language poetry, and more in this contemporary take on the Christmas story, uniquely told from a mother’s point of view. Experience the power of this spellbinding masterpiece, which in Adams’s words explores “what is meant by a miracle.”

Adams’s El Niño

Jones Hall

For more than 400 years, the Black American spiritual tradition has moved over, across, and through the waters—waters of life force, passage, cleansing, resistance, and renewal—depicted in such songs and verses as “Wade in the Water,” “Deep River,” “Crossing Jordan,” and “By the Waters of Babylon.”

The power of water and its spiritual dimensions equally resonates in the beautiful, sacred texts of Bach’s cantatas. Infused with poetry, Bach’s music sounds and speaks to every drop of water, in drought and in full flood, moving and alive.

Shall We Gather at the River

Park Avenue Armory

Eminent American composer John Adams returns to the Met after a decade-long hiatus for the company premiere of his acclaimed opera-oratorio, which incorporates sacred and secular texts in English, Spanish, and Latin, from biblical times to the present day, in an extraordinarily dramatic retelling of the Nativity. El Niño brings together three of contemporary opera’s fiercest champions, all of whom make highly anticipated company debuts: Marin Alsop, one of the great conductors of our time, who has led more than 200 new-music premieres; soprano Julia Bullock, a leading voice on and off stage; and pathbreaking bass-baritone Davóne Tines. Radiant mezzo-sopranos J’Nai Bridges and Daniela Mack take turns completing the principal trio. The moving, fully-staged new production also marks the Met debut of Lileana Blain-Cruz, resident director at Lincoln Center Theater, who received universal acclaim for her Tony-nominated 2022 production of The Skin of Our Teeth.

El Niño

Lincoln Center

Harawi is a deeply affecting hour-long song cycle for soprano and piano written by Olivier Messiaen. In addition to Julia Bullock and Conor Hanick’s performance of this sweeping work, this production breaks open Messiaen’s musical explorations of love and death into a newly physicalized and theatrical dimension.

Harawi

Libbey Bowl

She was his queen. He was her downfall.  San Francisco Opera's 100th Season begins with John Adams' thrilling new opera, commissioned for the Company's centennial and conducted by Music Director Eun Sun Kim.

Antony and Cleopatra

Segerstrom Center for the Arts

About</h3>
 Greek myth and opera are re-imagined through a classical and jazz-infused score and deeply poetic libretto. Two of the most visionary and daring musical voices of our time embark on a staged intervention into myth-making. spalding leads a company of nineteen vocalists and chamber orchestra, with Shorter's venerated jazz trio at its center.

(Iphigenia)

The Broad Stage

A living legend of jazz collaborates with one of the brightest lights of the younger generation in the West Coast premiere of a Cal Performances co-commission that reimagines what opera can be, and asks us to reexamine the stories we have inherited and the choices we make as a society.Wayne Shorter, 11-time Grammy-winning composer and saxophonist, has written the music, and esperanza spalding, 2022 Grammy nominee for Best Jazz Vocal Album, four-time Grammy-winning bassist, composer, and vocalist, is the librettist and plays the title role in Iphigenia, a radical new take on Euripides’ ancient Greek play Iphigenia in Aulis. Classical and jazz forms collide in an expansive score that features Shorter’s groundbreaking method of symphonic improvisation, lifting up Spalding’s artfully poetic and fractured libretto.The fully staged work is performed by a 28-piece chamber ensemble; the rhythm section of Shorter’s venerated quartet (Shorter himself does not perform); a cast of nine vocalists; and a chorus of 10 singers; with set design by icon Frank Gehry and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. As spalding explains, “Our Iphigenia has at its core a sense of autonomy—in this adventure of life, you have freedom of choice. The overarching sentiment is one of humanistic love, of wanting to re-awaken the dreams of youth free of the pressures of adulthood.”

Jazz: WAYNE SHORTER & ESPERANZA SPALDING’S …(Iphigenia)

University of California, Berkeley

The most recent opera by preeminent American composer John Adams—a glorious adaptation of Shakespeare’s immortal drama—has its Met premiere. Following her debut in the company premiere of Adams’s El Niño in 2024, soprano Julia Bullock stars as the irresistible Cleopatra, one of theater’s most complex and captivating characters, opposite bass-baritone Gerald Finley as the conflicted Antony. Adams himself takes the podium to conduct his lyrical and richly orchestrated score, leading a new staging by groundbreaking director Elkhanah Pulitzer that transports the story of troubled romance and political strife from ancient Rome to the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930s. Tenor Paul Appleby is Caesar, who goes to war with Antony, and mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong is Caesar’s sister and Antony’s forsaken wife Octavia.

Mark Grey

Composer, Sound Designer

Events

Upcoming events

May 12 - Jun 7, 2025

Antony and Cleopatra · The Metropolitan Opera

Past events

Sep 27 - Oct 4, 2024

Harawi California Tour · AMOC / American Modern Opera Company

14 - 23 Jun, 2024

The Comet / Poppea · The Industry

About

Mark Grey hasn't added a bio