Biography
Fanfare has hailed Lori Laitman, born in Long Beach, New York, on January 12, 1955, as “one of the most talented and intriguing of living composers.” Her mother performed on piano and violin while singing, and both of Laitman’s sisters likewise built careers in music. As a child she began inventing her own songs and absorbed such staples of children’s classical repertoire as Peter and the Wolf and Tubby the Tuba. Piano lessons began at age five, flute at seven, and formal composition emerged during her undergraduate years at Yale University, where she first cultivated an interest in scoring for film and theater. She remained at Yale to complete a master’s degree. Throughout the 1980s, while raising three children in New York, she continued to work in those dramatic idioms. A former roommate from Interlochen, fresh from a major competition victory and in need of new repertoire, prompted Laitman to try art-song composition. Though initially hesitant, she proceeded at the urging of her husband and the singer; the outcome was the 1991 setting of Sara Teasdale’s poem The Metropolitan Tower. That piece inaugurated a catalog now exceeding 250 songs along with operas and choral scores drawing on poets from antiquity to the present. “I found my voice in writing for voice,” Laitman has remarked. Her opera The Scarlet Letter, adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, received its premiere at Opera Colorado in 2016; she has also composed the children’s opera The Three Feathers to a libretto by Dana Gioia. For the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s centenary she created the orchestral score Unsung. Among projects planned for the late 2010s is the opera Uncovered, drawn from Leah Lax’s memoir Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home. The Journal of Singing has observed that “It is difficult to think of anyone before the public today who equals her exceptional gifts for embracing a poetic text and giving it new and deeper life through music.”
Albums