Randall Eng

RANDALL ENG founded and leads the AOP-NYU/Tisch Opera Lab with director Sam Helfrich. Under their guidance, GMTWP composers and librettists have created more than 50 short operas in collaboration with Tisch’s Department of Design, The American Opera Project, the New School, and partner organizations the Stonewall Inn, the Brooklyn Museum, International House, the Fort Greene Park Conservancy, the Walt Whitman Initiative, and NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts.

Randall’s own work lies at the intersection of opera, music-theatre, and jazz. His latest opera Norfolk (with librettist Monique Truong) is based on his father’s childhood in Norfolk, Virginia and Guangzhou, China. A commission from White Snake Projects, it premiered in 2023 alongside a set of five musical interludes created in conjunction with the hip hop artist Jason Chu.

His first opera Florida (with librettist Donna Di Novelli, Visiting Arts Professor) premiered at UrbanArias in Washington, DC in 2018, after previous presentations at Lyric Opera Cleveland, New York City Opera’s VOX Festival, and the Public Theater. Florida began its life as a GMTWP thesis.

Randall and Donna’s latest opera Before the Night Sky, about the Gemini twins Castor & Pollux and their half-sisters Clytemnestra & Helen of Troy, is in development at The American Opera Project. Excerpts were presented at Town Hall with SONOS Chamber Orchestra in 2017 as part of OPERA America’s New Works Forum.

Randall’s opera Henry’s Wife (with librettist Alexis Bernier) has been presented at the Center for Contemporary Opera, American Opera Projects, the Virginia Arts Festival, Manhattan School of Music, and the Shaw Festival. His other operas and theatrical works include The Dangers of Electric Lighting (Luna Stage Theatre), Cocktails (Circle East Theater), Usher, Falling (Opera Vindaloo Festival), and the video opera The Woman in the Green Coat (Edinburgh Fringe Festival).

His setting of the Walt Whitman poem “Miracles” was commissioned and premiered at Merkin Concert Hall in 2023 by Mirror Visions Ensemble. In 2019, the Boston Pops premiered his work Harbor, a collaboration with U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith for soprano and orchestra. His choral work Remain, a found text setting of a “Know Your Rights” immigration pamphlet, was commissioned and premiered at Cooper Union in 2018 by Ted Sperling’s 120-voice chorus MasterVoices. Other non-theatrical works include commissions for Albany Symphony Orchestra’s Dogs of Desire, the Composer’s Voice, baritone Marcus DeLoach, and violinist Conway Kuo.

Current non-theatrical projects include a 30-minute song cycle for two tenors and two baritones (to premiere by Mirrors Visions Ensemble in 2025), a song cycle for the countertenor Jordan Rutter (to premiere this fall), and a song cycle tracing the Chinese-American male experience over the past 150 years.

Randall frequently works as a musical dramaturge, musical supervisor, musical director, and pianist, specializing in new operatic, experimental, or jazz-oriented scores. He was an advisor on the 2011 Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess to musical adapter Diedre Murray, and has worked on many of Diedre’s other music-theatre pieces, as well as works by composers Anthony Davis, Leroy Jenkins, Kirsten Childs, Rachel Portman, Will Todd, and others.

He has been awarded grants, prizes, and residencies from the American Music Center, the American Composers Forum, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Montalvo Arts Center, the Ucross Foundation, the Bang on a Can Summer Institute, the John Duffy Composers Institute at the Virginia Arts Festival, Boston Metro Opera, American Opera Projects, the Eugene O’Neill Music Theatre Conference, Tapestry New Opera Works, and New Dramatists.

Randall is a graduate of Harvard University, Cambridge University, and GMTWP (Cycle 7). A Staten Island native and former Jeopardy! champion, he lives in Chelsea with his wife Katie Baldwin Eng (Cycle 11) and their 16-year-old daughter Olive (Cycle 40?). www.randalleng.com