Isaac Selya is Music Director of the Columbus Indiana Philharmonic, and founder and Artistic Director of Queen City Opera. His projects combine classical music with community collaborations, including the following:
- Reconstructing Tchaikovsky’s lost Undina as an eco-opera focusing on sustainable energy production, presented in collaboration with Green Umbrella and the Cincinnati Nature Center;
- Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín, in collaboration with the Nancy and David Wolf Holocaust and Humanity Center, commemorating the musicians of the Terezín Concentration Camp who performed Verdi’s Requiem as an act of defiance against the Nazis;
- Bach’s Coffee Cantata in collaboration with Deeper Roots Coffee and Green Umbrella, focusing on sustainable coffee production.
He conducted the Los Angeles stage premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta—an opera about a blind princess—in collaboration with the National Federation for the Blind, and with blind soprano Cristina Jones in the title role. His guest conducting engagements include with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen in Germany, the Xiamen Philharmonic in China, the National Symphony of Guatemala, and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra accompanying Cincinnati Ballet.
Selya has provided scholarship to publishers Bärenreiter, Henle, Schott, Breitkopf & Härtel, and the University of Chicago Press/Casa Ricordi in the critical editions of the works of Bach, Beethoven, Bizet, Mascagni, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Wagner, and Weber. He is currently working with Bärenreiter and artificial intelligence-powered linguistics company ipipapa as Chief Editor of a new edition of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, including a machine learning assisted transcription into International Phonetic Alphabet of the Russian text.
Selya’s conducting can also be heard on the soundtrack to the award-winning video game, Masquerada: Songs and Shadows. Selya is based in Cincinnati with his wife Pin-Hsuan Chen, a violinist and personal trainer. They have three cats—Tosca, Aida, and Tamino.