Now in his fifth season as Two Rivers Chorale artistic director and conductor, Timothy Sawyer has enjoyed an active career as a conductor, educator and professional singer after formal musical training at Bethel University (St. Paul), Exeter University (England), the University of Minnesota, and in doctoral-level study at the University of Iowa. He has done advanced conducting studies with Helmuth Rilling, the late Margaret Hillis, Vance George, Gregg Smith, and Sweden’s Eric Ericson. In addition to extensive experience as a tenor soloist and chorister, he is a veteran of several professional choirs, among them the Dale Warland Singers, the Ensemble Singers of VocalEssence of Minnesota under Philip Brunelle, and the Oregon Bach Festival Chorus, with which he shared in a collective Grammy Award for the 1998 recording of Kyzysztof Penderecki’s “Credo.”
Since 1989, Sawyer has been a member of the music faculty at Northwestern College in St. Paul where he is director of choral activities. Increasingly in demand as a clinician for choral festivals, in recent years has led numerous choral festivals throughout the United States and internationally in Ukraine, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Sawyer served a seven-year tenure as assistant artistic director of the Minnesota Chorale, principal symphonic chorus of the Minnesota Orchestra. An enthusiastic teacher of conducting, Sawyer is former member of the artistic staff of the conducting master class at the Toronto Bach Festival, and is associate director of the Oregon Bach Festival conducting master class. As a member of the board of Music in World Cultures, an international faith-based organization using music as a strategic tool in developing cross-cultural relationships, he also serves as adjunct conducting faculty for the International Music Academy in Ukraine and Estonia.