conductor, vocalist, pianist, teacher
Born in the United States and raised in Singapore, Phillip Cheah is currently based in New York City where he maintains an active professional life as a conductor, vocalist, pianist, and teacher.
Hailed by the New York Times for the “warm tone and carefully calibrated blend” elicited from his choirs, Cheah is currently in his third season as the Music Director of the Central City Chorus, one of New York’s “fine avocational choir” (The New Yorker). He has conducted New Music New York, Cerddorion Vocal Ensemble, Amuse, and C4 Choral Composer/Conductor Collective. He is also a regular guest conductor at the New York Summer Sings hosted by the New York Choral Society, the West Village Chorale, and the St George’s Choral Society. He has served as chorus master to several productions by the Indiana University Opera Theatre including Le nozze di Figaro, Così fan tutte, Little Women, and Daphnis et Chloe. From 2003-2006, he was the assistant conductor and répétiteur at the Amato Opera where he led performances of La Bohème, Le nozze di Figaro, Die lustige Witwe, Die Zauberflöte, La Traviata, Lucia di Lammermoor, and H.M.S. Pinafore. In 2008, he was invited by the New York Interschool Association to be a guest clinician for the Interschool Choral Festival.
Equally at home with musical theatre, Cheah has served as the music director for Hello, Dolly!, Once on this Island, and Gypsy at The Brearley School, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Assassins for Acting Manitou, Working at the Dwight-Englewood School, and The Fantasticks and Little Shop of Horrors for Bloomington Music Works, as well as a vocal coach for The Putney School’s production of Ragtime.
Cheah is also much sought after as a singer, having been praised by the New York Times for his “particularly potent contribution” with a “warm tone and stately presence” (paterre box) and a unique three-and-a-half octave vocal range which “defies the laws of nature” (Time Out New York). He has sung with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, American Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke's, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, Columbus Indiana Philharmonic, Saint Thomas Fifth Avenue, Trinity Wall Street, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, Saint Bartholomew’s Church, Temple Emanu-El, Vox Vocal Ensemble, Western Wind Vocal Ensemble, and Ensemble in Flore of Vassar College under the batons of Lorin Maazel, Riccardo Muti, Kurt Masur, Martin Hasselböck, Bernard Labadie, John Scott, William Trafka, Stephen Layton, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. He has appeared as a soloist with the Church of Saint Luke in the Fields, The Glass Menagerie, the Crescent Choral Society, and the Canby Singers. With the Vertical Repertory Players, he performed in a unique semi-staged programme of the Five Canticles by Benjamin Britten in 2011 and 2012 alongside tenor Daniel Neer and mezzo soprano Hayden Dewitt with narration by acclaimed actor Paul Hecht. He was also actively involved with the ComplineNYC project, a musical effort to bring to New York City a public offering of meditation through Gregorian chant.
An active recitalist, Cheah collaborates regularly with pianist Trudy Chan in performances at the Tenri Cultural Institute, the Church of Saint Luke in the Fields, and the Cornelia Street Café (as part of the 21st Century Schizoid Music series). In 2011, he was a featured artist at the annual Music of Now Marathon at Symphony Space where he premièred several movements from Frank J. Oteri’s song cycle the nurturing river. He has recorded on the Pro Organo and Tzadik labels. He is presently a member of the professional choir at the Church of Saint Luke in the Fields.
Known for his tireless championship of contemporary music, Cheah has performed and premièred works by many composers including Frank J. Oteri, Joe Manieri, John Eaton, David Lang, Milton Babbitt, Henry Cowell, Nicholas Slonimsky, James MacMillan, Ned Rorem, Elliot Z. Levine, Alexa Babakhanian, Bill Schuman, Steve Ebel, Anthony Ocaña, Ingram Marshall, and Egil Hovland. He sang Ralph Shapey’s Praise as part of the University of Chicago’s celebration of the late composer’s 80th birthday in 2002, as well as the American premières of Sir John Tavener’s monumental all-night vigil The Veil of the Temple at Lincoln Centre (2004) and Sir Paul McCartney's Ecce Cor Meum at Carnegie Hall (2006). In 2005, he won wonderful acclaim as music director of The Forest by Zeke Hecker, the first and only work commissioned by the Amato Opera in its 61-year history. That same year, he also co-founded C4 Choral Composer/Conductor Collective, a New York-based ensemble dedicated solely to the performance and promotion of the music written in the last quarter-century, where he performed as both conductor and singer. He has premièred vocal works written for him including Winter Birds and Titania’s Garage Sale by Jonathan David, A Man said to the Universe by Joseph Rubinstein, and the chamber cantata The Hour of Lead by Patrick Castillo. In 2011 he commissioned Jonathan David to write The Tightened String: An Elegy for 9/11 based on a poem (also newly commissioned) by David Hopes for the Central City Chorus to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. He will première a new song cycle Versions of the Truth by Frank J. Oteri in 2013 commissioned by ASCAP and written especially for him and Trudy Chan.
An accomplished pianist and accompanist, Cheah has accompanied various solo recitals as well as concerts in Indiana, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and New York, appearing with the Millennium Wagner Opera Company and the Opera Collective of New York. In 2003, he stepped in as a last-minute replacement pianist with the Aguavá New Music Studio for its concert at the American Festival of Microtonal Music in New York featuring the works of John Eaton. He accompanied soprano Elyse Nakajima in the world première of Patrick Castillo’s Leda and the Swan which was written for Nakajima. He is currently the staff accompanist at The Brearley School.
Cheah is also a passionate advocator for music education, having held teaching appointments at the Manhattan School of Music, The Putney School, and Cathedral High School where he was the Director of Music. In 2003, he was awarded a grant to study the German operas of Mozart in Vienna, Austria as part of a Summer Institute organised by the National Endowment for the Humanities. From 2006-2008 he was also a guest lecturer in music history at Barnard College.
In addition to performing, Cheah has also been the personal assistant to the composer/satirist Peter Schickele and the Manager for Concert and Choral Promotion at Oxford University Press until the dissolution of the New York music office in 2010. He received a Bachelor of Science in Piano Performance from Indiana University with a semester abroad at the Institut für Europäische Studien in Vienna, Austria, and earned a Master of Music in Choral Conducting and Opera Coaching from Indiana University. His principal teachers included Jan Harrington, Thomas Dunn, Carmen Téllez, John Poole, Christopher Harding, and Reiki Shigeoka-Neriki.
phillip@phillipcheah.com © Phillip Cheah. All rights reserved.