Alaskan Justin Birchell is a baritone, conductor, educator and composer. He holds a BA in Music Performance (2019) and an MM in Voice Performance (2021), both from UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music. He is currently A.B.D. (all-but-dissertation) toward a DMA in Choral Conducting from the University of Washington. At UCLA, Birchell was a recipient of the Elaine Krown Klein Fine Arts Scholarship, The Mimi Alpert Feldman Scholarship, and a Dean’s Medal for academic excellence, and was a Fellow of the Gluck Fellows Music Outreach Program. Justin was a 2019-20 winner of the UCLA Philharmonia All-Stars concerto competition (his performance of Ravel’s Don Quichotte à Dulcinée with the Philharmonia can be viewed here).
Justin is currently the Music Director of Wallingford United Methodist Church in Seattle and an assistant conductor of the U.W. Chorale. He is also a member of Choral Arts Northwest, and of the U.W. Chamber Singers. Birchell has recently added Seattle Symphony pre-concert lectures to his range of artistic and educational activities in the Seattle area; he is also the 2023-24 season lecturer for Tacoma Opera. Justin is a member of the National Association of Teachers of Singing and the American Choral Directors’ Association. He is the former Artistic Director of Vivat Musica! Polish Choir of the Seattle Polish Home,
For many years, Justin was passionately active in the performing arts scene in his hometown of Anchorage, Alaska. He was the primary music director and singing teacher at TBA Theatre, Inc, an educational nonprofit, for four years. He music-directed TBA’s mainstage production of The Sound of Music and composed the live original score for TBA’s cirque nouveau spectacle Illusions: Wild Things, among many other projects there. For two years, Justin served as the choir director at Anchorage Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, where he also composed a number of original choral works. He also presented the workshop World Music as a Window on the Human Spirit to the Pacific Northwest District Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association. As an educator, Birchell has presented workshops, masterclasses, and guest lectures for the University of Washington, University of Alaska Anchorage, Palmer Arts Council, Anchorage School District and others. Justin was the 2018 winner of the Ted Stevens Young Alaskan Artist Award from the Anchorage Festival of Music.
Justin is also a passionate lover of wilderness, and before college, he spent over three years working in a remote wilderness lodge in the Brooks Mountain Range of Northern Alaska, about 250 miles from the nearest town (or opera house!).
As an opera performer, Justin began his career in Anchorage Opera’s chorus while still in high school and later sang the role of Sacristan in Anchorage Opera’s Tosca and Samuel in their Pirates of Penzance. Other notable opera roles include Figaro in UAA Opera’s The Marriage of Figaro, Dr. Falke and Herr Frank in Portland State University’s Die Fledermaus, Silvio in Opera Fairbanks’ I Pagliacci, along with numerous roles through Opera UCLA, including creating the roles of Manfred in Lost Childhood and Padre Antonio in Juana, both world premieres.
Birchell also remains active as a composer. His choral arrangement Attics of My Life (orig. by the Grateful Dead) was premiered by the UW Glee Club in March of 2022. Birchell’s self-produced one-man “video opera” Why the Heck Not? premiered online in June of 2021. His original song-cycle Three Nocturnes - Words of the Night was premiered at UCLA in June 2018 by soprano Stephanie Deprez and pianist Victoria Kirsch, and in June 2019 he sang the premiere of his own art song Aurora Aubade, on poetry from Alaskan poet Ian Colbert’s beautiful volume Midnight Elegies. Three Nocturnes - Words of the Night can be heard here, and Aurora Aubade can be heard here. Justin’s incidental music for The Death of Edgar Allan Poe traveled to Scotland in the summer of 2018 for TBA Theatre’s production at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Justin is also a student of Indian Classical Music. He studies khyal classical singing of North India with his teacher, Arul Seth. Arul is descended via his guru Pt. Harish Tiwari from the great Pt. Bhimsen Joshi. A demonstration of khyal singing was included in Justin’s 2021 recital, This Is Just A Recital. The khyal demonstration can be viewed here. The complete This Is Just A Recital can be viewed here. For more recordings, click the YouTube button at the upper-right of this page.
