Meet the Artists
Uncharted Journey
Performances October 25 and 26, 2025
Conductors
Sara Jobin
Sara Jobin (also known as Tarana) was a Soviet Studies major in her early years at Harvard and is delighted to be considered a “new” conductor. She is thrilled to be performing Shostakovich for the New Conductors Orchestra, holding the view that his piece carries a message in particular for American audiences at this time. Ms. Jobin has served as Music Director for the Center for Contemporary Opera and was Resident Conductor for the Toledo Symphony for three years. She has conducted for the San Francisco and Los Angeles Operas, and the members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Disney Hall. Ms. Jobin currently teaches an online class about Opera and the Climate Crisis, and she loves Sufi music — particularly the teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan on The Mysticism of Sound.
Eric R. Stewart
Conductor/composer Eric R. Stewart has collaborated with artists including the Argento Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, the Gregg Smith Singers, the Cambridge Modern Orchestra, the gamUT Contemporary Ensemble, the New York City Brass Choir, and members of the American String Quartet and the New York Philharmonic. He has appeared at such venues as Carnegie Hall (Zankel Hall), the Four Seasons Centre of the Canadian Opera Company (Bradshaw Amphitheatre), the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts, and has been broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC). His compositions have been premiered at festivals including Aspen, FUBiS (Berlin), CASMI (Prague), and June in Buffalo.
Eric was a finalist in the International Antonin Dvorak Composition Competition, as well as for the ASCAP Morton Gould Award. He was the recipient of the Arthur Plettner Fellowship from the University of Toronto, the Susan and Ford Schumann Scholarship from the Aspen Music Festival, and the Louis Cheslock Memorial Scholarship from the Peabody Conservatory of Music. Recordings of Eric are available on the Albany and MSR Classics Labels.
Eric holds degrees in composition from the Peabody Conservatory of Music (B.M., M.M.) and the University of Toronto (D.M.A.). He currently lives in New York City. He serves as Music Director and Conductor of the Island Symphony Orchestra and the Long Island Festival Orchestra. He is the founder and Artistic Director of the Mahler Festival of Long Island and the Director of Orchestral Studies at Long Island University- Post, where he also teaches composition, orchestration, and aural skills.
Composers
Matt Curlee
Matt Curlee creates music that reflects the connections between the natural world and the human psyche. As a composer of concert music, his recent work has focused on the interplay between the abstract spaces of physics, biology, and psychology, and musical space. Recent commissions include works for the Eastman Percussion Ensemble (EPE), 3D Percussion, RPS Collective, the US Air Force Band, and many other solo performers, ensembles, and collaborators of all kinds - visual artists, dancers, animators, scientists, and filmmakers. An EPE performance of Matt’s 2024 percussion sextet ""Little One"" was filmed by the award-winning Continuous Motion Productions and released as an EP that garnered over 80,000 streams in its first 4 months on Spotify. His music is frequently performed across North America, Asia, and Europe, and his work for TV/film has been featured on ABC, Hulu, Apple TV+, Disney Plus, and Prime Video.
Matt is an associate professor of music theory at the Eastman School of Music, where he holds the prestigious Eisenhart award. As an avid practitioner of improvisational music, Matt has a particular interest in ear-brain interactions and processes that unify composition, improvisation, and performance. This area of study has fed his work at Eastman, where he designed an advanced skills curriculum and has worked with many populations of students to develop real-time cognitive skills for performance.
When not writing, performing or teaching, Matt prefers to be on the side of a mountain or deep in the woods, camera in hand.
Pierre Fontaine
Pierre Fontaine is a composer whose music, rooted in the French neoclassical tradition of the early 20th century, draws on the forms, melodies, and harmonies of the past to create an intimate and contemporary sound. Inspired by European dances, international poetry, and ancient myths, his work explores the dialogue between the arts and adapts classical techniques to a modern creative voice.
Pierre studied in the United States with Dr. David Conte, a former student of Nadia Boulanger, and earned a Master’s degree in Composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His music has been performed by various ensembles, ranging from string quartet to symphonic orchestra, chorus or chamber ensembles.
A classically trained pianist, he also composes for film and has scored ten short films. Combining composition and performance, he regularly accompanies silent films in theaters in Europe. A multiple international competition winner, he will travel to the U.S. in 2026 for the premiere of his Dance Suite No. 1 for symphony orchestra, awarded First Prize in the 2025 Highsmith Orchestral Composition Competition.
Recent works include a song cycle for soprano and piano, a triptych for flute and harp, and two dance suites for piano and orchestra. He also composed a tribute piece for the 22nd anniversary of the Thônes Harmony Orchestra. Pierre teaches composition, music theory and musicianship, orchestration and form and structure at the conservatoire.