Michael Jeffrey Shapiro


Michael Jeffrey Shapiro is an American composer, conductor, and author.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and studied at Columbia College, Columbia University, the Mannes College of Music and the Juilliard School. He has worked with musicians and performers including Teresa Stratas, Janos Starker, Tim Fain, Matthew Kraemer, Jacob Schnitzer, Marin Alsop, Sergiu Comissiona, Jerry Junkin, John Corigliano, Neil W. Levin, Kim Cattrall, Miah Persson, Clamma Dale, Katherine Ciesinski, Jerome Rose, Tomer Zvulun, Adam Abeshouse, Lara Downes, Hila Plitmann, Sangeeta Kaur, Grant Gershon, and Anita Darian. He has conducted, composed for or worked with organizations including the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Jewish Committee, the Hawthorne String Quartet, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, the Los Angeles Opera, the Atlanta Opera, the Theater Trier, the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, the United States Navy Band, the West Point Band, the Royal Canadian Air Force Band, the Dallas Winds, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and the Virginia Symphony Orchestra.
Shapiro was for sixteen years the music director and conductor of the Chappaqua Orchestra and has written a score for the 1931 film Frankenstein, which is in four versions for chamber orchestra, large orchestra, wind ensemble, and opera.In 2024, he was nominated as a conductor for a Grammy Award for "Mythologies II" for "Best Classical Compendium."
Shapiro was music consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and has produced and performed in concerts by Jewish composers who had fled The Holocaust or had been murdered during it, and musicians imprisoned in Theresienstadt Ghetto. His oratorio, VOICES, is a setting of poetry and songs of Sephardic victims of the Holocaust and was premiered at Central Synagogue, New York City by Deborah Simpkin King conducting Ember Choral Arts and the American Modern Ensemble. Two movements of the oratorio were later performed by Grant Gershon and the Los Angeles Master Chorale at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.
His writing includes the book The Jewish 100, and research into klezmer music and into music in the plays of William Shakespeare.
In 1984, Tim Page, writing in New York Times, described Shapiro as

Selected work

Opera

Film scores

Symphonies

Orchestra

Band

Concerti

Chamber

  • String Quartet, recorded by Argus Quartet
  • Piano Quintet, recorded by Argus Quartet and Steven Beck, piano
  • Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano
  • Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano, recorded by Tim Fain, violin, and Steven Beck, piano
  • Sonata for Clarinet and Piano
  • Sextet for Piano and Winds
  • Shir for Flute and Piano
  • Yiddishkeit for Clarinet and Piano
  • Musical Chairs for brass quintet
  • American Realists for Clarinet, Violin, Cello, and Piano
  • Watching the Students Grow for two Flutes and Piano

Solo Instrumental

  • Eliahu Hanavi Variations - for solo violoncello, recorded by Sato Knudsen
  • Peace Variations- for solo violin, recorded by Tim Fain
  • Kaddish-Berakhot-Nigun - for solo flute

Piano

  • Five Preludes
  • Mysteries
  • Sonata No. 1
  • Sonata No. 2
  • Bitter Waltzes, recorded by Steven Beck
  • Passages, recorded by Steven Beck
  • *Creation
  • *Babel
  • *In the Wilderness
  • *Hannah
  • *A Light
  • *Ruth
  • *Naso
  • *The Deluge
  • *Hineni!
  • American Interludes, dedicated to Lara Downes
  • *Calming
  • *Tending
  • *In Every One

Choral

  • Three Psalms
  • Psalm 137
  • Three Shakespeare Madrigals
  • There is that in me
  • Spanish Medieval Lyrics
  • Voices based on Sephardic poetry of the Holocaust, oratorio in eight movements, recorded by Daniel Mutlu, Ember Choral Arts, American Modern Ensemble, Deborah Simpkin King, West Coast premiere by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Grant Gershon, conductor
  • In Paradisum
  • Cultivo una rosa blanca
  • Liberation Cantata

Song cycles

Recordings

Recordings include: