Leadership

Dr. Paul Flight is director of the UC Choral Ensembles and oversees eight music groups at UC Berkeley including the Cal Chorale, Cal Jazz Choir, California Golden Overtones, Men’s Octet, Noteworthy, Perfect Fifth, BareStage Productions as well as the UC Alumni Chorus.

Dr. Flight is the founding director of Chora Nova, an auditioned chorus based in the city of Berkeley, and artistic director of the music ensemble Schola Cantorum San Francisco. Over the past 17 seasons, he has served as artistic director of the chamber choir California Bach Society, and for nine years, he was principal conductor of the Madison Early Music Festival. He has also been a visiting professor of music at Berkeley, where he directed the music department’s top choral ensembles. 

For many seasons he was principal conductor of the Madison Early Music Festival in Wisconsin, where he directed masterworks by Bach, Telemann, Vivaldi, Purcell, Dufay, and Guerrero. He has been a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, directing the University’s top choral ensembles, and at UC Santa Cruz, directing the University Chamber Singers, and at Mills College, where he lectured on music history and musical form. Also at Mills, Flight conducted an operatic double-bill production of Holst’s Savitri and Milhaud’s Les Malheurs d’Orphée, and in addition directed a special concert by Schola Cantorum of San Francisco in celebration to mark the publication of Professor Nalini Ghuman’s book, Resonances of the Raj: India in the English Musical Imagination.

Flight earned his doctorate at Indiana University, where he studied conducting with Robert Porco. His research focused on the Venetian composer Giovanni Croce (1557-1609), and he has recorded a program featuring Croce’s works for Harmonia, a nationally syndicated radio show. He as appeared as a guest on three of KALW Radio’s performing arts programs, My Favorite Things, Voice Box, and Open Air.

An accomplished singer in his own right, Dr. Flight performs opera and oratorio internationally. At the Edinburgh International Festival, he performed with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in John Adams’ El Niño. He has performed the first and third countertenor roles (Balthazar and Gaspar) in this work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Den Norske Opera in Oslo, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, at Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington. He has sung the central countertenor solo in Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms with the Cleveland Orchestra and at the Cincinnati May Festival. When he sang the title role of the highly acclaimed Oakland Opera production of Glass’s Akhnaten, Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle described his singing as “pure and regal.” He sang the U. S. premiere of Unsuk Chin’s Cantatrix Sopranica with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and also performed it with the Berkeley Symphony under Kent Nagano.