Albert Innaurato began studying the piano at five and from the ages of 10-18 was a student in the “youth program” at the Philadelphia Musical Acadamy (now the University of the Arts) where he continued his piano studies and also studied composition, musical analysis, and musicology. His teachers in composition in that time were George Crumb, George Rochberg and especially Vincent Persichetti.
At the California University of the Arts, he studied composition with Schoenberg pupils Leonard Stein and Dika Newlin and also played for the new vocal music workshop of the late Marni Nixon. At Yale though a graduate student in the Drama School, he continued to study composition and to work as a pianist and assistant to conductors who worked at Yale. He was an assistant to the late Otto-Werner Mueller and worked with him coaching and preparing the first complete performance of Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny in America. Among famous conductors he assisted at Yale was Leopold Stokowski. He also worked with Alan Curtis in Baroque studies.
During a career as a playwright, and more intensively from 1988 on Innaurato worked as a music journalist and lecturer. He wrote frequently for the New York Times Arts and Leisure section on many topics from the Lament Tradition in Serious Music to considerations of harmonic procedures in newer music, to articles on less familiar operas such as Pfitzner’s Palestrina. From 1988 to 2001 he was a regular contributor to Opera News, analyzing familiar and less familiar operas, reviewing recordings including those of the earliest singers to record, to interviewing current stars. In that time he contributed articles to Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, OpernWelt and a large number of now defunct Italian periodicals.
He adapted Puccini’s La rondine for Lincoln Center, lectured for the New York Philharmonic, The Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society and when in Los Angeles for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, for whom he did an extensive series on Mahler. He wrote articles on serious music for Vogue, Vanity Fair, New York and reviewed symphony, chamber music and opera for Newsday. Currently, he is a frequent contributor to parterre box.
For the Metropolitan Opera Guild produced by Paul Gruber, he recorded 20 tapes/CDs of opera from Carmen to Death in Venice, most with him at the piano. He also became a regular lecturer for the Guild and gave intermission talks from the piano when the Metropolitan Opera Saturday Broadcasts were underwritten by Texaco and produced by Richard Mohr.
In Philadelphia, Innaurato became Head of Development in Music Theatre and Opera for the now defunct Prince Music Theater. He then was Artistic Director of Creative Development Projects at Center City Opera Theater. He worked as dramaturg and stage director of workshops and productions of many new operas by composers such as Gregory Spears. Jack Perla, Michael Ching and Ron Vigue. He directed the American premiere of The Shops by Edward Rushton and Dagny Dagny Gioulami.