Farmington High School Graduate, David Sawicki directs National Tour of Evita

David Sawicki, a recent graduate of Harvard University has entered the field of music in a big way. 
  
David Sawicki is a Boston-based musician and software engineer.  He is currently serving as the Associate Music Director / Conductor of the First National Tour of the Broadway Revival of Evita.  In 2013, David co-founded Opera Brittenica, Boston's newest musical organization, specializing in the performance of the operas and musical works of Benjamin Britten.  He continues to serve as the Artistic Director of the company, in addition to working remotely as a speech scientist and natural language processing researcher at RAMP in Boston, a growing startup company that uses speech recognition technology to provide search engine optimization and multimedia indexing services.  David received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Harvard University in 2012, graudating magna cum laude with highest honors in Linguistics with a secondary field in Music.  While at Harvard, David conducted over 100 performances for the Hasty Pudding Theatricals over three years, while studying under Federico Cortese and Andrew Clark.  He has music directed operas and musicals regionally at Harvard, MIT, and Northeastern University.  His honors thesis in psycholinguistics, Phonological Markedness and Short-Term Memory Recall, received the highest departmental award of summa cum laude and was presented at the 39th annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society in Berkeley, California in February 2013.  In 2010, David toured North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia as a member of the jazz a cappella group, the Din & Tonics, for which he also served as tour manager.

The First National Tour of Evita opens in Providence, RI on September 9th, 2013, and has performances scheduled through July 2014 in 30 cities throughout 19 US states.  The 2012-13 Broadway production, directed by Michael Grandage, was a revival of the 2006 West End production, and featured Ricky Martin as Ché and Elena Roger as Eva.  It was nominated for three Tony awards and ran for 337 performances.  Evita, a musical based on the life of Eva Perón, was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, and was first performed in 1978 in London.http://evitaonbroadway.com

David, a graduate of Farmington High School, was very involved in the music department.  Tom Johnston, FHS Band Director, says that David is a true Renaissance man. A fabulous vocalist, clarinetist, and pianist, he was a member of the Wind Ensemble, Chamber Singers, Jazz Band/Combo and Madrigal Singers.  He was an All-State Musician and volunteered as the IAR music director for their musical theatre performances.    

Opera Brittenica, led by Joshua Collier and David Sawicki, is Boston’s newest musical organization, devoted to exploring and performing the varied works of Benjamin Britten. The company’s mission is twofold: to significantly enrich the culture of musical performance that currently exists in Boston and to provide the opportunity for local artists at the professional and pre-professional level to present the vast repertoire of Britten’s music to all of Boston and the surrounding communities.  Opera Brittenica's inaugural production of The Rape of Lucretia will be performed in Boston and New York in October 2013 as part of the centennial of the birth of Benjamin Britten.www.operabrittenica.com