Since 2005, Craig Fields has been musical director of Sonomento, MacPhail’s premier adult vocal ensemble.
Craig received his musical training from Chapman University in Southern California, the California Institute of the Arts, the Music Academy of the West, Dartmouth College, the San Francisco Opera Merola Artist Training Program, and the Zürich Opera’s International Opera Studio. He has received numerous prizes and awards, including two Rockefeller Fund for Music Awards, a National Opera Institute grant and the Walt Disney Academic/Arts Achievement Scholarship.
His professional singing began in 1975, when he won the San Francisco Opera national auditions and went on to perform over forty leading baritone roles at the opera houses of Zürich, Berlin, Freiburg, Mannheim, Geneva, New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Hawaii, San Francisco and many others. He appeared on stage with José Carreras, Cesare Siepi, Dame Margaret Price, Simon Estes, Carolyn Watkinson, Agnes Baltsa, Franzisco Araiza, Maria Chiara, Hildegard Behrens and many others.
After his singing career, he stage-directed and produced opera in the US for over twenty years and served as general/artistic director of Opera Roanoke, Opera on the James, and the Duluth Festival Opera, which he founded. Fields also served as associate professor of voice at Virginia Tech’s School of the Arts until 2003, where he led their voice and opera programs. For the last fifteen years he has been a very active choral conductor, lecturer and adjudicator.
His choirs having toured Europe five times, winning international awards at the Brahms International Choral Competition with Sonomento in Germany, 2015, as well as Poland and the UK. His commercial recording of Jon Polifrone’s “Requiem: for those we love”, which he commissioned and conducted with the Blacksburg Master Chorale in 1993, won critical accolades in Choral Review and the Washington Post and is still available on the BMC label through Amazon.com.
He is currently has a private voice studio in Minneapolis for training the next generation of rising classical/opera singers. His students have performed at opera houses all over the world and they have received scholarships from the graduate music programs at Indiana University, Oberlin, New England Conservatory, and Juilliard Music School.
In 2019, he co-founded the Orpheus Music Project in Minneapolis, which commissions and produces vocal music ‘for social good’ and supports emerging vocal artists. He serves there as company artistic director.
Favorite non-musical hobby: International travel