Teddy Poll

Teddy Poll, from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, recently finished his tenure as a Rita E. Hauser Conducting Fellow at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Yannick Nézet-Séguin since 2014. He conducted Trouble in Tahiti at the 2015 Glimmerglass Festival, where he was also assistant conductor in 2014 and 2015 for Ariadne auf Naxos, Macbeth, Catone in Utica, andCarousel. In 2013-14, Teddy was Apprentice Conductor to JoAnn Falletta at the Buffalo Philharmonic. He has conducted workshops and performances of new compositions for Opera Philadelphia and Washington National Opera, and has worked in masterclass with Vladimir Jurowski, Michael Tilson Thomas, Marin Alsop, Jacques Lacombe, Gustav Meier, Larry Rachleff, and Mark Gibson.

As a composer, Teddy has won an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and two Singing City prizes. His first opera, based on Lorca’s play Yerma, was premiered in New York at the NOMADS Festival. His second opera, in process, is set to religious texts by Auden and Yeats. He was a summer fellow at the European American Musical Alliance in Paris from 2006 to 2008, and studied composition with Samuel Adler at the Freie Universität in Berlin in 2010 and 2011. He has been commissioned by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society and the Presser Foundation to compose a string quartet in honor of Robert Capanna for performance in the 2017–18 season.

Teddy received a bachelor’s degree in composition from Columbia University, where he studied with Fabien Lévy and Fred Lerdahl. He holds a master’s degree in orchestral conducting from Mannes College, where he studied with David Hayes and Joseph Colaneri. His other teachers include Philip Lasser, Mark Shapiro, Otto Werner-Mueller, and Benjamin C.S. Boyle.