Mr. Luke Housner has maintained a balanced schedule with a combination of opera assembling, music direction, vocal coaching and extensive concertizing.
In January 2019, Mr. Housner served as music director, principal coach and performance pianist for a fully staged production of Dvorak’s Rusalka as part of the Academy of Vocal Arts 2018-2019 season. This was Mr. Housner’s tenth production in this capacity at AVA, having done the same with Debussy’s Pelleas et Mélisande, Janácek’s Kát’a Kabanová, Barber’s Vanessa, Massenet’s Werther, Wagner’s Das Rheingold (twice) and Strauss’s Arabella, Capriccio and Elektra.
For the past ten consecutive summers, Mr. Housner has musically directed and performed complete operatic works of Mozart, Humperdinck, Dvorak and Wagner in opera workshops held in Vancouver, BC, Portland, OR, Toronto, ON and Bloomington, IN. Starting in the summer of 2019, the two Canadian workshops will be relocating to Minneapolis, MN and Austin, TX. From 2007-2010, Mr Housner was principal coach and performance pianist for Astoria Music Festival in Oregon and then went on to coach and musically direct a production of Cosi fan tutte and Le nozze di Figaro for the Lyric Opera Studio of Weimar in Germany. Mr. Housner has served as assistant conductor, vocal coach and accompanist at the Central City Opera Festival, Portland Opera, Utah Opera Festival, Brevard Music Festival and at the Hong Kong’s Academy of Performing Arts.
For twenty years as accompanist of the Philadelphia Singers, Mr. Housner performed on various subscription series concerts as pianist, organist and harpsichordist, served as rehearsal pianist and vocal coach for soloists and played under the batons of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Charles Dutoit, Christoph Eschenbach, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Sir Simon Rattle, Sir Andrew Davis and Kurt Masur.
Native of Western Massachusetts, Mr. Housner earned a Master’s Degree of Music in Vocal Accompanying and Coaching from University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana with instruction from internationally acclaimed vocal coach John Wustman. Previously, he received a Bachelor’s Degree of Music, with a double major in Piano Performance and Vocal Accompanying from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music.