Craig Smith Memorial

Craig Smith, Boston-Based Conductor Noted for Bach Cantatas, Dies at 60

By ALLAN KOZINN
The New York Times

Craig Smith, who as the founding music director of the Emmanuel Music orchestra and chorus in Boston led the first complete cycle of Bach’s cantatas in the United States as well as expansive explorations of works from the 16th century to the present day, died on Wednesday in Boston. He was 60.

Pat Krol, the executive director of Emmanuel Music, said the cause was heart failure.

Mr. Smith was best known internationally for his collaborations with the iconoclastic director Peter Sellars and the choreographer Mark Morris.

He founded Emmanuel Music, a group based at Emmanuel Church in Boston, in 1970. Its original goal was to present a season of Bach cantatas, but after a few performances, Mr. Smith decided to make his way through the entire collection of more than 200 works.

That project occupied Mr. Smith and his ensemble for seven years, and he maintained the tradition of conducting a Bach cantata every Sunday as part of the church’s worship service.

But in the ensemble’s own concerts, he found other composers to explore. He led most of the major sacred works of the 17th-century composer Heinrich Schütz, as well as the compete Schumann lieder and the chamber music and vocal works of Brahms and Debussy. Mr. Smith devoted 51 concerts, over seven years, to the chamber and vocal music of Schubert and performed several works by the contemporary composer John Harbison.

Mr. Smith’s work with Mr. Sellars included three Mozart operas, “Così Fan Tutte,” “Don Giovanni” and “Nozze di Figaro,” which were controversial for their urban 20th-century settings.

He also conducted Mr. Sellars’s production of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare” and works by Weill, Gilbert and Sullivan and Gershwin, as well staged performances of Bach’s Cantatas 82 (“Ich habe genug”) and 199 (“Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut”). The soloist in those works was the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who began her career as a violist in the Emmanuel Music orchestra. Her recording of the works with Mr. Smith and the ensemble is regarded as one of the highlights of the current Bach discography.

Mr. Smith’s principal collaboration with Mr. Morris was a choreographed setting of the Handel work, “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato,” first performed at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, where Mr. Smith was principal conductor from 1988 to 1991. He conducted it at the Serious Fun festival at Lincoln Center in 1995.

Mr. Smith was born in Lewiston, Idaho, on Jan. 31, 1947. He began studying the piano at 4 and continued at Washington State University and the New England Conservatory, where he completed a bachelor’s degree in 1969 and a master’s in 1972. He taught at the conservatory from 1993 to 2000 and also at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University, Juilliard and the Tanglewood Music Center.

His discography includes the Peter Sellars Mozart trilogy on DVD and CDs devoted to the music of Bach, Schütz, Mozart and John Harbison.

Mr. Smith is survived by a brother, Kent Smith of Brussels.