8. A Tempest: Caliban dares to dream again

7. Caliban urges Stephano to do the deed

6. Caliban leads Stephano to Prospero's home

5. Caliban convinces Stephano to kill Prospero

4. Caliban decides Stephano is a "God"

3. Caliban curses Prospero

2. Caliban bitterly complains to Prospero

1. Caliban swears an oath to Prospero

Russell Currie is a versatile composer having composed music for opera and music theatre, orchestra, chamber music, dance and film.  He is “a composer who puts an idiosyncratically musical syntax at the service of a coolly romantic esthetic” (The New York Times).  His music is “rich in dramatic orchestral color with direct emotional lyrical lines that discover an effective balance between dissonance and clarifying tonality” (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians) and “knows how to sustain, modulate and build a mood that is all of a piece" (Opera News).

His works have been sponsored and commissioned by New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Millennium Pictures, Scottish Television, Glasgow City Council, ASCAP, American Music Center, Meet The Composer, Astor Foundation and The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Prague.  Articles on his music have appeared in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, numerous international magazines and periodicals with TV and radio appearances on the BBC, WQXR, WNYC, and Deutsche Welle.  He trained at the Eastman School of Music with Christopher Rouse and Joseph Schwantner, where he was a three-time recipient of the ASCAP Max Dreyfus Award for Music Theatre.


Mackintosh (the life and times of Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh) was commissioned by Scottish Television, Glasgow City Council and the Glasgow Development Agency.  Hailed “as a laudable idea!” (The Glasgow Herald), Mackintosh is presently in-progress while excerpts have been performed during BBC Music Live 1999, ScotFest 1999, UKwithNY 2001 and at The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.

Rooted in traditional opera technique, Rimshot--The Banishment and Rise to Fame of Joe Rimshot, Rock Drummer, is a satirical opera that explores the trappings of fame and fortune casting opera singers as heavy metal rockers.  Premiered in NYC at The Pace Downtown Theater (with sets designed by Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selznick), “RIMSHOT, like Twyla Tharp's EVERLAST, deals in the icons of pop culture, balancing the evanescence of success against a contrived ‘happy end’ as tart as that of The Threepenny Opera.  Currie has brought a playful sense of humor to the story, giving it an O. Henry feeling.  Starting out as melodramatic soap opera, it ends in whimsy as the "villain" is reborn to the hero's wife via reincarnation with idiomatic characterizations and a lively sense of ensemble" (Opera News). 

His concert works have been performed throughout the US and Europe.  Dreams, commissioned by the Poe Society of Prague, premiered in the Rudolfinum by the Prague Symphony during Illustrations of a Tormented Mind.  Dreams first premiered at the Miller Theater, as a setting of the Poe poem for soprano, tenor and piano, which was commissioned, by Lauren Flanigan and Thomas Young. Thomas Stacy, the principal English hornist for the NY Philharmonic commissioned Wet On Wet and premiered it at the Carmel Music Festival

His film music includes orchestral/choral scores for feature films to intimate shorts and documentaries.  He scored Rob Green's The Bunker, a thriller/horror feature starring Jason Flemyng and Jack Davenport.  Recorded in The Rudolfinum with The Prague Symphony Orchestra, the music is “a brooding old fashioned score which heralds the first of many portents to doom and age old scare tactics.  But they work!” (FrightFest 2001). The Bunker was released throughout Europe, Scandinavia and Japan and now available on DVD.

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