Michael Jeffrey Shapiro (born February 1, 1951) is a noted American composer and conductor as well as the author of The Jewish 100 and Jewish Pride. The Jewish 100 has been published in British, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Polish, and Romanian editions--in addition to its original American release.
Since 2002 Shapiro has been the music director and conductor of the Chappaqua Orchestra in New York's Westchester County. He served for two years as the music consultant to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where he produced and performed music by a number of composers who were either murdered by the Germans and their collaborators or had survived as refugees from the Third Reich. He has also been the assistant conductor at the Zurich Opera Studio.
Shapiro's works, which in the aggregate address nearly every medium, have been performed widely throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe--with broadcasts of premieres on National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Israel Broadcasting Authority, Sender Freies Berlin, WQXR, and WCBS-TV. His music has been characterized in a New York Times review as "possessing a rare melodic gift." His oeuvre includes more than one hundred works for solo voice, piano, chamber ensembles, chorus, orchestra, as well as for opera, film, and television.
Shapiro has received awards and grants from Martha Baird Rockefeller Composer's Assistance, Meet the Composer, the Henry Evans Traveling Fellowship of Columbia University, and the Boris Koutzen Memorial Fund. He has also received the Columbian Award and the Sigma Alpha Iota Composers Competition prize.
Shapiro has collaborated with such artists as Teresa Stratas, Jose Ferrer, Janos Starker, Marin Alsop, Sergiu Comissiona, Eugene Drucker, Kim Cattrall, Tim Fain, Gottfried Wagner, Edward Arron, Jerome Rose, Mariko Anraku, Clamma Dale, Anita Darian, Florence Levitt, Kikuei Ikeda, Ayako Yoshida, Harris Poor, John Edward Niles, Kathryn Amyotte, and Emily Wong, and organizations such as the Houston Symphony Orchestra, Opera Theatre of Northern Virginia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, American Jewish Committee, Hawthorne String Quartet, Locrian Chamber Ensemble, Artemis, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, and Dateline NBC.
