William Hobbs

Born in Austin, Texas, William Hobbs received his Bachelor’s degree in Piano Performance
summa cum laude from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a Master of Music in
Piano Performance, Research and Literature from the Eastman School of Music in
Rochester, New York. His teachers have included Thomas Schumacher, Paul Parmelee,
Doris Pridinoff Lehnert and Larry Graham for piano and Neil Varon, Brad Lubman and
Allan MacMurray for conducting.

Mr. Hobbs works at many of the world’s major opera houses as conductor and coach.
These include the Opéra National de Paris, the Salzburg Festival, San Francisco Opera,
Chicago Lyric Opera, Seattle Opera, Washington Opera and the Opéra de Monte-Carlo.
His repertoire ranges from Handel to the European avant-garde, as well as works by Slavic
composers and a number of premieres by American composers such as Lowell Liebermann
and John Musto. He has assisted conductors Claudio Abbado, Sir Charles Mackerras, Jiří
Bělohlávek, Sir Andrew Davis, James Conlon, Robert Spano, Richard Bonynge, Donald
Runnicles, Jiři Kout, Marco Armiliato and many others. He has worked closely with singers
such as Renée Fleming, Susan Graham, Karita Mattila, Lauren Flanigan, Olga Borodina,
Frederica von Stade, Sonia Ganassi, Roberto Alagna, Frank Lopardo, Robert White, Paul
Groves, Placido Domingo, Rod Gilfry, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Sam Ramey and Kurt Moll.
Mr. Hobbs joined the Piano and Voice Faculty at Westminster Choir College in Princeton,
New Jersey in Fall 2010, and was appointed Assistant Professor effective Fall 2011. He is the
Founder and Artistic Director of Opera Slavica, devoted to presenting full productions of
masterworks from Russian, Czech and Polish composers, providing singers with no
background in these languages with the knowledge and training to perform in them. Opera
Slavica presented the U.S. Russian-language premiere, and the New York premiere, of
Prokofiev’s Maddalena in 2013. The 2012 production of Jenůfa featured Susan Marie
Pierson as the Kostelnička, and received enthusiastic praise from Alan Kozinn (New York
Times).

Notable recent appointments include the Music Directorship of Opera America’s The Opera
America Songbook Project in 2011. He made his professional conducting debut at Tri-Cities
Opera in Binghamton, New York, conducting Rossini’s l’Italiana in Algeri.
Mr. Hobbs has devoted a large portion of his career to working with young singers and
pianists. He was on the faculty of the Aspen Opera Theater Center of the Aspen Music
Festival for six years, was invited by the New National Theater in Tokyo as Visiting Master
Coach, and has been on the faculty of CoOperative at Westminster Choir College since
2008. He worked as a staff coach for the Juilliard School of Music in New York for many
years, and was recently appointed to the Juilliard Faculty.. 

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