Tobias Picker (born July 18, 1954) is an American composer, pianist, and conductor,[1] noted for his orchestral works Old and Lost Rivers, Keys To The City, and The Encantadas, as well as his operas Emmeline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, An American Tragedy and Lili Elbe, among many other works.

At the age of eight, he began composing and studying the piano: I was raised by my teachers on a diet of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schuman, and eventually Brahms, my favorite.

Three years later, Picker was taken into the preparatory division of the Juilliard School of Music for instruction in piano and theory.

[9] Soon after, in 1978, the premiere of Rhapsody for Violin and Piano led New Yorker critic Andrew Porter to deem Picker "a genuine creator with a fertile, unforced vein of invention".

[21] In 2010, Picker composed a ballet, Awakenings, for the Rambert Dance Company, inspired by the work of Oliver Sacks.

[29] His tenure at Tulsa Opera would see the selection of Lucia Lucas as the first transgender opera singer to have a leading role on the American stage[30] (for which she is featured in James Kicklighter's documentary film, The Sound of Identity),[31][32][33][34][35][36] a baseball-themed production of Rigoletto adapted for an open-air baseball stadium to accommodate the gathering restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic,[37] "Greenwood Overcomes," a concert with new works by African-American composers to honor the memory of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921,[38][39] as well as a Thaddeus Strassberger-directed production of Salome.

[43][44][45][46][47] The East Coast premiere of Awakenings was performed by Odyssey Opera in partnership with Boston Modern Orchestra Project, conducted by Gil Rose and directed by James Robinson, on February 25, 2023, at the Huntington Theater.

[48][49] Picker's Lili Elbe, starring Lucia Lucas, premiered in October, 2023, at Theater St.

[55] The Encantadas (for narrator and orchestra) features texts drawn from Herman Melville's descriptions of the Galápagos Islands.

[80] He collaborated with Roald Dahl's biographer, Donald Sturrock, on Fantastic Mr. Fox,[81] and most recently Aryeh Lev Stollman on Awakenings,[70] as well as poets Richard Howard[82] and W. S.

[83] Picker's conductor collaborators have included Leon Botstein,[84] Peter Ash,[85] James Conlon,[86] Sergiu Comissiona,[87] Edo de Waart,[88] Lukas Foss,[89] Giancarlo Guerrero,[90] James Levine,[91] George Manahan,[92] Kurt Masur,[93] Gil Rose,[94] John Williams,[95] Pinchas Zukerman[96] and Christoph Eschenbach.

Picker has also worked with William Burden,[107] Gerald Finley,[108] Elizabeth Futral,[109] Susan Graham,[80] Nathan Gunn,[80] Lucia Lucas,[110] Jennifer Larmore,[111] Diana Soviero,[112] and Dolora Zajick.

"[118] Sacks wrote of the inspiration he took from Picker's music in the preface to his book, The Island of the Colorblind, saying he "owe[d] a special debt to Tobias Picker's version of The Encantadas", and that "whenever, in the writing, memory failed me, listening to the piece operated as a sort of Proustian mnemonic, transporting me back to the Marianas and the Carolines".