Joel Feigin is an internationally performed composer, whose operas, chamber, orchestral, and piano works have been widely praised for their “very strong impact, as logical in musical design as they are charged with emotion and drama.” (Opera Magazine)

Feigin’s first opera, Mysteries of Eleusis, written on a Guggenheim Fellowship, was commissioned and premiered by Theatre Cornell. In 1999, it was featured at the Moscow Conservatory (Russia) and then repeated at the Russian American Operatic Festival. A second opera, Twelfth Night, has been seen in three productions, praised for “many striking passages, hushed and shimmering for lovers, sparkling and cheeky for the comic figures.” The recent Santa Barbara production “brought audience spontaneously to their feet in salute. Feigin’s magical score is key to that exuberant response…. It’s a sleeper that deserves to be in the repertory of major opera houses.” (Bravo California). Feigin’s current opera-in-progress, Outcast at the Gate, has had two highly successful workshops, by New York’s Center for Contemporary Opera and at the Colburn School in Los Angeles.

Instrumental commissions include orchestral, chamber, and piano works, including Variations on a Theme of Arnold Schoenberg for Piano Spheres, and Variations on Empty Space, commissioned by pianist Margaret Mills, and included on her Cambria CD, Meditations, and Overtones. Aviv: Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra, written for Yael Weiss on a Fromm Commission, can be heard on Feigin’s widely praised, late CD, Music for Chamber Orchestra (Toccata Classics). In Fanfare Magazine, David DeBoor Canfield writes that “regardless of the style in which he is writing, Feigin retains his unique compositional voice.

This music demands to be heard,” and Ken Meltzer finds it “an immensely gratifying experience… convincing and communicative.” Other CDs include Lament Amid Silence (MSR) and the two-CD set, Transience (Albany). More