Arizona Opera Cast Members & Creatives

CLINT JOSEPH BORZONI is an award- winning composer whose “highly original yet lyrical music…[and] natural gift for melody and harmonic structure” (The Huffington Post) has resulted in international performances and premieres.

He has collaborated with librettist John de los Santos on the opera When Adonis Calls. The lyrical opera (fashioned entirely from the poetry of Gavin Geoffrey Dillard), was selected for inclusion by Fort Worth Opera’s Frontiers and Opera America’s New Works Forum. The world premiere at the Asheville Lyric Opera sold out, and was followed by a collaborative new production in Chicago between Thompson Street Opera and Pride Films & Plays.

Their second collaboration, The Copper Queen, won the Arizona Spark competition, and was slated to open the McDougall RED Series in the 2020/21 Season— excerpts were recently performed at the American Lyric Theater’s Alumni concert, with a third sold-out workshop at Opera America. Arizona Opera is making an ambitious turn toward film by producing a motion picture adaptation of the company’s second world premiere commission, The Copper Queen. Arizona Opera—along with the opera’s creators and its all-female production team, led by director Crystal Manich—have joined forces with longtime video partner and creative agency Manley Films, to create a feature-length film of the opera.

Clint and John are currently in development with The American Opera Project on a new holiday opera, “The Christmas Spider”. Other operatic works include Margot Alone in the Light, an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s story All Summer in a Day (premiered by operamission and subsequently produced by Opera On Tap); and Antinous and Hadrian (commissioned by operamission). The orchestra suite based on Antinous and Hadrian won the Queer Urban Orchestra’s 2018 composition competition, and will be performed by the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra next season.

Borzoni has composed songs and song cycles for many leading vocalists. He won BARIHUNKS Best New Song (2015), Best New Solo Work for Baritone (2017), operamission’s cabaret song competition, and was a prize winner of Sparks & Wiry Cries Second and Fourth annual NYC songSLAM. Borzoni’s additional honors include the Morton Feldman Award, the Boston Metro Opera Festival Award, an artist residency with the American Lyric Theater’s Composer Librettist Development Program (2009), an artist residency with The American Opera Project’s Composers and the Voice Program (2010), and an associate producer credit for Patricia Racette’s CD “Diva on Detour”.

In addition to composing opera, art song, and concert music, his musical My Life as a Bald Soprano received an Off-Broadway run at the Midtown International Theater Festival. Borzoni has also scored three films for the production company JR VISION, which were featured at the Take Two Film Festival, the Miami Short Film Festival, SeriesFest, NewFilmmakers Los Angeles, and Anthology Film Archives. His music has been presented by the Merola Opera Program, the Glimmerglass Festival, the Bay View Music Festival, the Wintergreen Festival, the Summer Street Festival, St Martin-in-the-Fields, the U.S. embassy in Switzerland, La MaMA, Symphony Space, Opera Grows in Brooklyn, the New York Youth Symphony, the Walt Whitman Project, the Jacobs School of Music, the Guildhall School of Music, the Mannes School of Music, and many more venues and universities.

He has recently been commissioned by Arizona Opera, the Delaware Art Museum, the Big Apple Corps Symphonic Band, and Barihunks. He studied with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici at the City University of New York where he received an MA in Music Composition. He recently finished a new oratorio, The Wife of Lot, which was commissioned by the Gavin Dillard Poetry Library & Archive, and made possible by a generous donation from Steven J. Schimmel. The Wife of Lot is part of the collection of the Senator John Heinz History Center, in association with the Smithsonian Institution.

He recently completed a chamber piece, Requiem Fragments, which was commissioned by tenor Mitchell Sturges. He has begun work on his six opera, Being in Love Alone, with librettist Dr. Judith G. Wolf. He currently resides in New York City and is the Resident Composer for Musica Marin, a nonprofit organization that presents, supports and inspires classical music throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.