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The American conductor, music scholar and and teacher, Daniel E. Abraham, completed conducting studies at the University of Maryland with Paul Traver, was a Conducting Fellow at the 1997 Oregon Bach Festival, where he worked and studied with the renowned Bach interpreter Helmuth Rilling, and has studied conducting technique with David Hoose of Boston University and William Weinert at the Eastman School of Music.
Daniel E. Abraham has led orchestral, choral, and musical theater ensembles in the Boston, Washington, and Toronto areas. Dedicated to performance, scholarship and education, he is Director of the Music Program and Director of Choral Activities at American University, where he directs the American University Chorus, the University Chamber Singers, and teaches music history, upper level music theory, and music appreciation courses ranging from The Music of Bach, Handel, & the Late Baroque to A History of Rock-n-Roll. He is a frequent clinician, adjudicator, and festival jurist and is music and artistic director of The Bach Sinfonia (Washington, D.C.). He has directed ensembles as a Visiting Professor at The George Washington University, and was choral/vocal director of the University of Maryland's Collegium Musicum. Pursuing a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology, he is at work on a dissertation concerning George Frideric Handel's dramatic oratorio, Alexander Balus.
Daniel E. Abraham has assisted with the production of volumes for The Carl Phillip Emmanual Bach Edition (Oxford University Press), has edited music for Cambridge University Press, and is currently editing G.F. Handel’s oratorio Alexander Balus for the Hallische Handel Ausgabe (Bärenreiter). He has served as a Capital Chapter representative to the National Council of the American Musicological Society, and as the chapter's Secretary-Treasurer. He was the 1996 winner of the Irving Lowens Award for excellence in student musicological research and in 1998 was the recipient of the Daniel Pomeroy Prize given by the American Handel Society, for Performance and Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century Music.
The Washington Post and others have praised Daniel E. Abraham's artistry and performances as having “uncommon precision and exuberant vitality” and “keen insight and coherence.” As a conductor and musicologist he “blended those skills marvelously in a program that combined learning with enjoyment in ideal proportions.” Recent engagements have included concerts at the Kennedy Center with Tony Powell/Music & Movement, choral preparation for the Kennedy Center Honors Gala and for Ray Charles, and with various modern premieres on period instruments and with vocalists with The Bach Sinfonia. He recently appeared on the PBS series History Detectives. |
