Of Lithuanian heritage, composer Veronika Krausas was born in Australia raised in Canada, and lives in Los Angeles. She has directed, composed for, and produced multi-media events that incorporate her works with dance, acrobatics and video. The Globe & Mail (Toronto) writes:

“...her works, whose organic, lyrical sense of storytelling are supported by a rigid formal elegance, give her audiences a sense that nature’s frozen objects are springing to life.”

She was one of 6 composers involved in the acclaimed mobile opera Hopscotch. Alex Ross of the New Yorker called Hopscotch, “a remarkable experimental opera.” Her first opera, The Mortal Thoughts of Lady Macbeth, based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, was premiered at the New York City Opera’s VOX 2008 festival. A full production was mounted in Los Angeles in August 2010 to sold-out audiences. Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times said of her chamber opera, “Something novel this way comes.”

The Calgary Herald called Ghost Opera (her third opera) “Calgary’s premier arts event of the year.” Opera Canada cited Ghost Opera as one of the best operas of the decade. Ghost Opera is a dramma giocoso with life-sized puppets created with The Old Trout Puppet Workshop with the Calgary Opera and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in 2019.

Commissions and performances include the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Industry, New York City Opera, Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble musikFabrik at the Darmstadt Music Festival, Chicago Architecture Biennial (2016), Piano Spheres for Gloria Cheng, The Vancouver Symphony, ERGO Projects, Esprit Orchestra, Fort Worth Opera, Jacaranda Music, Motion Music, San Francisco Choral Artists, LiederAlive, and the Penderecki String Quartet. She received the Detroit Symphony’s 10th annual Elaine Lebenbom Memorial Award in 2020.

Language of the Birds, a commission for the 25th Anniversary of the San Francisco Choral Artists with the Alexander String Quartet, using text by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, premiered in May 2011 in San Francisco. It was released on CD by Foghorn Classics with Ferlinghetti reciting his poetry. Her chamber orchestra work analemma was an official selection of the US for the 2012 World Music Days in Belgium and will have a Lithuanian premiere in Vilnius in 2015 with Vykintas Baltakis conducting. She was the featured composer at the 2013 Céret Music Festival. In 2008 Krausas organized a concert and CD release for The Player Piano Project, a collection of works for player piano by 22 composers from 6 countries.

Sillages for four double basses premiered on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Chamber Series in 2014 and on the Jacaranda concert series in March 2015. In 2016 the LA Phil commissioned Porcupine for 5 double basses inside a tent created by artist Ana Prvacki that premiered during the LA Phil’s Noon to Midnight New Music Festival in 2016. Stephen Vanhauwert commissioned and premiered her new piano études at RedCat in June as part of the Piano Spheres series and Gloria Cheng commissioned a piece for harpsichord for her Piano Spheres concert. L’ombre du luth is now published by Bellmann Musik (Germany). Her solo piano pieces UN-intermezzi have been released by Grammy-nominated pianist Aron Kallay and were performed Steven Vanhauwaert in Portugal, in Paris by Suzana Bartal, and at the Palaces of the President of Malta by Tricia Dawn Williams.

Krausas has music composition degrees from the University of Toronto, McGill University in Montreal, and a doctorate from the Thornton School of Music at USC in Los Angeles, where she is a faculty member in the Composition Department. She is a pre-concert lecturer and interviewer at the Los Angeles Philharmonic and serves on the advisory boards of Jacaranda Music and People Inside Electronics. ▪