Glen Roven
BIO FOR GLEN ROVEN
Glen Roven, four-time Emmy Award winner, is a composer, lyricist, conductor, pianist, translator and CD Producer. He wrote the music and lyrics to Dr. Suess's The 5,000 Fingers of Doctor T which opens on Broadway next season. He made his third Carnegie Hall appearance this March appearing with Bass-Baritone Daniel Okulitch who sang his concert music. The concert was also reprised in Santa Fe at the Opera. Roven made his Carnegie Hall debut conducting his Violin Concerto based on The Runaway Bunny, with Glenn Close and the American Symphony Orchestra and Catherine Zeta-Jones just recorded the Piano Trio Version. He also recorded the piece with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Brooke Shields for Sony/BMG. Baritone Mark Stone performed an entire evening of Roven's concert music also at Carnegie Hall March 2010. This past Mother's Day, Soprano Lauren Flanigan debuted his Goodnight Moon, A Lullaby for Soprano and Orchestra, at a free concert in Central Park for 10,000 and has subsequently performed the Aria at Alice Tully Hall, Kimmel Center, and all over the country. His Fifteen Song Cycles and Art Songs (billholabmusic.com) are routinely performed all around in the world. Mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard recently premiered some of his songs at her Carnegie Hall recital. He has conducted the National Symphony, the Seattle Symphony, the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, The Munich Philharmonic, The Radio Luxembourg Orchestra, as well as many others, and made his Israeli conducting debut in 2001 conducting the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in two sold-out concerts honoring Leonard Bernstein. He has conducted for Renee Fleming, Placido Domingo, Jessye Norman, Erwin Schrot, Charles Castronovo and Kathleen Battle and was chosen to conduct four Presidential Inaugural Concerts, as well as America's Millennium Celebration, produced by Steven Spielberg.
As Founding Partner and Artistic Director of GPRrecords, he conceived and produced Poetic License/ 100 Poems 100 Performers where performers including Catherine Zeta-Jones, Patti LuPone, Jason Alexander, Cynthia Nixon, Florence Henderson, among others, read their favorite poem; this album has become the best selling Poetry album of all time. Current and future GPRreords project include the afore mentioned Runaway Bunny (with Michael Douglas narrating Poulenc's Babar) and solo albums for Patricia Racette, Charles Castronovo, Alan Cumming, Luca Pisaroni, Paulo Szot, Ramon Vargos, Lauren Flanigan, Daniel Okulitch, Jonathan Beyer, Talise Trevigne (the last four all include Roven's art songs), the Five Boroughs Song Book, an album of Opera Arias by William Bolcolm and Jake Heggie and many other. GPRrecords is distributed world-wide by Naxos. Also in the works is an all-star CD benefiting amFAR featuring Joyce DiDonato, Jamie Barton, Christine Goercke, Noah Stewart, Eric Ownes and more. In addition to appearing hundreds of times on television, he has written songs for, conducted and produced for Julie Andrews, Aretha Franklin, Kenny G., Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Kermit the Frog, Patti LaBelle, Liza Minnelli, Diana Ross, Martin Short and many others. He conducted Frank Sinatra's last concert on television and Sammy Davis's final television appearance. Annual, he creates the musical numbers for the AFI Tributes. In the corporate world, he routinely does all the music for Steve Wynn and Michael Milken projects.
He began his Broadway career as a rehearsal pianist for Pippin while still in high school, and at nineteen was the musical director of Sugar Babies on Broadway. He also wrote the scores for John Guare's, Lydie Breeze and Gardenia, Christopher Isherwood's A Meeting By the River and Larry Gelbart's Mastergate, plus was a contributing composer to A...My Name is Alice.