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Dawn Sonntag
Dawn Sonntag is a composer, singer, pianist, and choral conductor. Her compositions, which include vocal, choral, chamber, orchestral, and dance music, have been performed across the US, Germany, Norway, and in France, where she studied composition at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris under the auspices of the European American Musical Alliance.
Sonntag's choral music has been premiered and performed by choirs at the Ohio State University; the European-American Musical Alliance Composers' Choir in Paris, France; the Chor des Kollegium Artiums in Heidelberg, Germany; the Oslo University International Summer School Choir; the University of Minnesota Women's Chorus; the Augsburg College Choir, and numerous church and community choirs in Wisconsin, Texas, Minnesota, and Ohio.
Recent compositional projects have included a choral/chamber orchestra setting of Paul Gerhard's "Befiehl Du deine Wege," commissioned in 2007 for the 25th anniversary of Luther Seminary's Reformation music festival in Saint Paul, Minnesota; music for the newly released documentary series, "Voice to Vision," a series of four films relating the experiences of 20th-century genocide survivors via personal narrative, visual art, and music; a Norwegian-English bilingual choral setting of "Psalm 23," commissioned for the 2008 Leif Eriksson International Festival in Minneapolis; a setting of John Donne's seven-sonnett crown cycle, La Corona, for voice and chamber orchestra; and several settings of Iowa Poet Laureate Marvin Bell's poems, which were premiered in March, 2009.
Sonntag has performed opera, oratorio, and art song repertoire on stages across the US, in Germany, France, and Norway. She has appeared with the Florentine Opera of Milwaukee; at the Chamizal National Theater in El Paso, Texas; with the Heidelberg Gilbert and Sullivan Ensemble; with Opera Columbus; and as a soloist with numerous chamber and large community choirs. As a member of an eight-voice professional touring vocal ensemble based in Heidelberg, Germany, Sonntag performed repertoire ranging from Bach and Mendelssohn to spirituals in southern Germany and France. Sonntag is the recipient of several performance awards, including the Inge Pittler Award in both lied singing and accompanying in Heidelberg, Germany, and the 2007 Kenwood Symphony Master's Aria and Concerto competition in Minneapolis.
Sonntag has extensive experience as a conductor of church, community and college choirs, and was one of eight graduate-student semifinalists chosen nationally for the American Choral Director Association's national conducting competition in 2007. She has conducted the Ohio State University Choirs, the University of Minnesota Women's Choir, and the University of Saint Catherine Concert Choir. As director of the Leif Eriksson International Choir in Minneapolis, Sonntag conducted choral music in Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic, and premiered several choral works by Norwegian composers, including Stig Holter, organist and faculty member at the Grieg Academy in Bergen, Norway; and Henning Sommero, the most widely performed composer in Norway. Sonntag has also appeared as a singer in performance with Holter and Sommero. In 2007, she was awarded a Foreign Language Area Studies fellowship for the study of advanced Norwegian in Olso, Norway.
Self-taught as a pianist until the age of 18, Sonntag won several awards for piano performance as a high-school student, and during her undergraduate studies began working as a professional pianist for the Milwaukee-Philadelphia Ballet Company, for whom she composed several pieces that were performed and televised. As a collaborative pianist, Sonntag has performed a myriad of concerts and recitals with professional singers, instrumentalists, and choruses. Sonntag has also performed as both a pianist and singer in master classes with Charles Spencer, Ulrich Eisenlohr, Leonid Dorfmann, and Elizabeth Buccheri, and has performed duo piano recitals together with pianist William Wangensteen.
Sonntag holds a DMA in voice performance and composition from the University of Minnesota, where she studied composition with Alex Lubet and voice with Wendy Zaro-Mullins; an MM in choral conducting from the Ohio State University under the tutelage of Hilary Apfelstadt; an MA in voice performance from Antioch University's McGregor School of the Arts in Tuebingen, Germany with John Porter; a graduate diploma in piano with an emphasis in lied and chamber music from the Hochschule fuer Kirchenmusik in Heidelberg, Germany, under the tutelage of Martin Smith; and a BM in voice performance from the University of Texas, El Paso, before which she pursued studies in trumpet performance with Wayne Cook, piano with Armand Basile, and voice with Yolanda Marculescu-Stern at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Sonntag has taught music theory at the University of Minnesota and the University of Saint Catherine. Currently Sonntag is Assistant Professor of Music at Hiram College. She is married to theologian and writer Holger Sonntag, and has two sons, Adam, a recent University of Washington business school graduate, and Ethan, an aviation student at Central Washington University.