Pamela Murray

Pamela Murray’s “naturally beautiful lyric voice” has been praised by the Boston Globe. She has performed as soloist in Handel’s Dixit Dominues with The Handel and Haydn Society under Christopher Hogwood at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall and Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, and with Emmanuel Music under the direction of Craig Smith, Seiji Ozawa, and John Harbison, including Bach’s Magnificat and Handel’s Samson and Solomon. She is a founding member of Favella Lyrica, an ensemble that has performed in Jordan Hall as part of the Emerging Artist series and on the Boston Early Music Festival series. Their recordings of Baroque duets on the KOCH International label have received critical acclaim. Ms. Murray has sung the roles of Mrs. Grose in Turn of the Screw, and The Female Chorus in The Rape of Lucretia, both by Benjamin Britten, with Prism Opera Company, directed by Thomas Stumpf.

Ms. Murray also enjoys a varied teaching career. She is on the voice faculty at Middlesex School, The American Repertory Theater Institute for Advanced Theater Training, and the Harvard Extension School, where she teaches several courses in Musical Theater Performance.

Thomas Stumpf

Thomas Stumpf received his degrees in piano performance from the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, and was awarded the Bösendorfer Prize and the Lilli Lehmann Medal. His performing career has taken him across four continents and he is featured on seven CDs. His 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 and at UMassLowell. He has premiered many compositions by contemporary American composers and has performed with such luminaries as Rita Streich, Edith Mathis, D'Anna Fortunato, Richard Stoltzman, Jack Brymer, Walter Trampler and Leslie Parnas. He has also appeared with the HongKong Philharmonic, the Boston Pops Orchestra (under Arthur Fiedler), Alea III, the Lexington Symphony and numerous other ensembles.

His compositions have appeared 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, one section of which was recorded on the Neuma label by soprano Joan Heller. His choral work though I walk was performed in New York City by the Pharos Music Project and by C4.

Stumpf is Director of Music at Follen Church, where he has conducted works ranging from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and Mozart’s Requiem to the music of Arvo Pärt, Olivier Messiaen and Duke Ellington. He also conducts the Youth Choir and directs the Youth and Junior Choirs’ productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operas every June. His experience at Follen has led to his first book: a collection of essays entitled A Sounding Mirror: Courage and Music in our Time, published in 2005 by Higganum Hill Books. Stumpf was also the Artistic Director of Prism Opera, and conducted and directed Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito (in his own translation and adaptation), as well as operas by Britten, Vaughan-Williams and Holst.

Stumpf has taught at the New England Conservatory, UMassLowell (where he was head of the keyboard department), and Boston University (where he  was Chair of the Collaborative Piano Department) as well as Tufts University. He regularly gives master-classes, lectures and recitals at the Musikschule in Mannheim, Germany, and has been a guest at many conservatories, colleges and universities in the U.S.