photo by Sarah Gormley Photography
Bio
Nathan Koci is a musician, music director, conductor, and collaborative artist working across disciplines including musical theater, folk music, jazz, contemporary and experimental classical music, and dance.
He most recently served as the Music Director for the 1st National Tour of Anäis Mitchell’s Tony Award-winning folk musical Hadestown. As a music director, he also worked on Daniel Fish’s radical re-imagining of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, which won the 2019 Tony Award for Best Musical Revival, as well as a special OBIE award for its off-Broadway run at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Working with the same team from Oklahoma! (Director Daniel Fish and Orchestrator/Arranger Daniel Kluger), Nathan contributed vocal and music arrangements, as well as music direction and supervision, to a deconstruction of the Frank Loesser musical The Most Happy Fella, resulting in a music-centric work for 8 singers and 12 musicians called Most Happy in Concert that had its premiere at Bard Summerscape Festival in 2021, and went on to a fully staged production at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2022 (called “a knotty, multi-genre overture”, and also “an existential war with musical theater itself” by the New Yorker).
He continues to work as an Associate MD and conductor on Hadestown on Broadway, and is currently working as the Music Supervisor on Oklahoma! that will open on London’s West End in February 2023 at the Wyndham’s Theater.
As a conductor, Nathan has worked with ensembles and companies such as the Wordless Music Orchestra, LA Opera, SF Opera, Ghost Ensemble, and the New School Chorus, where he also teaches collaboration and improvisation to classical, jazz, and drama students.
As a performer, Nathan can be heard most recently playing accordion, banjo, and piano on clarinetist and composer Sam Sadigursky’s three-volume set of albums, The Solomon Diaries. Evoking the history, abundant life, and slow decay of the Borscht Belt region of NY’s Catskill Mountains, the set was called “a monumental achievement” by Chronogram magazine, who went on to say that “the interplay between the duet partners is strikingly telepathic…where clarinet and accordion perform such speedy, acrobatic flips that they seem to morph into one another”.
Nathan also performs on accordion with The Hands Free, an improvising acoustic quartet with Caroline Shaw, James Moore, and Eleonore Oppenheim. They most recently embarked on a collaborative set of music with vocalist Alicia Hall Moran, and look to continue the collaboration in 2023. Their 2018 self-titled release is available on New Amsterdam Records.
Nathan also has performed with ensembles including The Knights, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Modern, Bang on a Can, the Tri-Centric Orchestra, and the Michael Leonhart Orchestra, working with artists, composers, and directors including William Kentridge, John Heginbotham, Maira Kalman, Anthony Braxton, Stew and Heidi, Shovels and Rope, Ted Hearne, Timo Andres, Tlale Makhene, and Bham Ntabeni.