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Michael Jarrell was born in 1959 in Geneva, Switzerland. He began his musical studies at the Conservatorie in Geneva. In 1996 he served as composer-in-residence at the Lucerne Festival and in 2000 the Musica Nova Helsinki Festival was dedicated to him. The Salzburg Festival commissioned a piano concerto and Jarrell was made a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2001. Cassandre was composed in 1994 and premiered in Paris with Marthe Keller and directed by David Robertson. It is based on the myth of the Trojan princess Cassandre, known for her extraordinary beauty and extreme misfortune, retold in Christa Wolf’s short novel in 1983 and later adapted as a stage play by Gerhard Wolf. Jarrell describes the piece as a “spoken opera” with text spoken by an actress against the music of a small orchestra. The Ojai Music Festival is pleased to be hosting the West Coast premier of this piece during the 2008 Festival. Jarrell became a professor of composition at the higher Academy of Geneva in 2004 and he opened his first opera at Carnegie Hall in 2006. He now teaches at the Hochschule für Musik in Vienna.