Veronika Krausas
composer
About this Artist
Composer Veronika Krausas was born in Australia of Lithuanian heritage, raised in Canada, and currently lives in Los Angeles. She has directed, composed for, and produced multi-media events that incorporate her works with dance, acrobatics and video. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) writes “her works, whose organic, lyrical sense of storytelling are supported by a rigid formal elegance, give her audiences a sense that nature’s frozen objects are springing to life.”
The Calgary Herald called Ghost Opera (her third opera) “Calgary’s premier arts event of the year.” Opera Canada cited it as one of the best operas of the decade. Ghost Opera is a dramma giocoso with life-sized puppets created by The Old Trout Puppet Company with Calgary Opera and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in 2019.
She was one of six composers involved in Yuval Sharon’s acclaimed mobile opera Hopscotch. Alex Ross of The New Yorker called Hopscotch, “a remarkable experimental opera.” Her first opera, The Mortal Thoughts of Lady Macbeth, based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, was premiered at the New York City Opera’s VOX 2008 festival. A full production was mounted in Los Angeles, with Yuval Sharon directing, in 2010. Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times said of her chamber opera, “Something novel this way comes.”
Commissions and performances include the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Concertgebouw, The Industry, New York City Opera, Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival, Detroit Symphony, Ensemble musikFabrik at the Darmstadt Music Festival, Chicago Architecture Biennial (2016), Piano Spheres for Gloria Cheng, Vancouver Symphony, ERGO Projects, Esprit Orchestra, Fort Worth Opera, Jacaranda Music, Motion Music, San Francisco Choral Artists, Alexander String Quartet, pianist Inna Faliks (with the Master and Margarita Suite for piano and speaker), LiederAlive, and the Penderecki String Quartet.
In 2019 Detroit Symphony premiered Caryatids (for 21 players) that they commissioned as the recipient of the Elaine Lebenbom Prize. In 2022 Thomas Ades conducted the full orchestral version during the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Gen X Festival and with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam.
Krausas was the artistic curator and one of the composers for Interstitial, a joint project between Brightwork newmusic, Hex Vocal Ensemble and 6 Los Angeles librettists and composers. She has music composition degrees from the University of Toronto, McGill University in Montreal, and a doctorate from the Thornton School of Music at USC in Los Angeles, where she is a faculty member in the Composition Department. She is a founding member of the performance arts collective Sprung.