Damien Sneed will be leading the Springfield Symphony Orchestra at our Classics & Jazz concert on January 13, 2024. Tickets are available online or through our box office.
As a multi-genre recording artist and instrumentalist, Damien LeChateau Sneed is a pianist, vocalist, organist, composer, conductor, arranger, producer, and arts educator whose work spans multiple genres. He has worked with jazz, classical, pop, and R&B legends, including the late Aretha Franklin and Jessye Norman, Wynton Marsalis, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, J’Nai Bridges, Lawrence Brownlee, the Clark Sisters, and many others. Sneed is a 2014 Sphinx Medal of Excellence recipient. Some of the faculties he has served on include the Julliard School of Music, Manhattan School of Music, Berklee College of Music, and New York University. In 2020, Alvin Ailey Dance Theater commissioned Sneed to create an original score for Testament. The Opera Theatre of Saint Louis commissioned him to compose THE TONGUE & THE LASH, an opera imagining a post-debate conversation between James Baldwin, which premiered in May 2021, and a reimagined adaptation of Scott Joplin’s opera, TREEMONISHA, which premiered on May 20, 2023. During the 2022 – 2023 season, he conducted Nathaniel Dett’s Ordering of Moses at Riverside Cathedral with orchestra and his own, Chorale Le Chateau, for the Harlem Renaissance centennial in June 2022; Sneed had his LA Philharmonic debut as a vocal soloist in Marsalis’ ALL RISE Symphony for Hollywood Bowl’s Centennial in September 2022; he conducted the Flint Symphony Orchestra for Patti Austin’s final performance in October 2022; and Sneed presented his ‘Our Song Our Story Tour,’ featuring several Metropolitan Opera singers and the Griot string quartet with Sneed on piano from November 2022 – February 2023.