Craig Trompeter

Craig Trompeter
Director, Early Music Ensemble

Craig Trompeter is the founder and Artistic Director of Chicago’s acclaimed Haymarket Opera Company. As cellist and violist da gamba he has performed with Second City Musick, the Chicago Symphony, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Chicago Opera Theater, Music of the Baroque, the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society, the Cincinnati Symphony, and the Oberlin Consort of Viols. He has performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Glimmerglass Festival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Valletta International Baroque Festival in Malta and has appeared as soloist at the Ravinia Festival, the annual conference of the American Bach Society, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and with Music of the Baroque. Trompeter has recorded works of Mozart, Bologne, Biber, Boismortier, Marais, Vivaldi, Handel, Greene, Henry Eccles, and a potpourri of Elizabethan composers on the Harmonia Mundi, Cedille, and Centaur labels. As a modern cellist, he was a founding member of the Fry Street String Quartet and premiered several chamber operas by MacArthur Fellow John Eaton, performing as actor, singer and cellist. He has taught master classes at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Oberlin, Grinnell College, and the Chicago Musical College. In 2003 he founded the Feldenkrais® Center of Chicago where he teaches Awareness Through Movement® and Functional Integration®. He has given Feldenkrais workshops throughout the nation in universities, music conservatories, opera companies, and dance studios. Trompeter conducts the Early Music Ensemble at the University of Chicago and teaches Baroque Performance Practices at Northwestern University.