David has appeared onstage making music since early childhood.  He began assisting his concert pianist mother, Ann Heiligman Saslav, in delivering children’s concerts at age 7, and performed in his first choral concert at age 10 while attending the Walden School in Reisterstown, Maryland, in 1974.

He appeared with his sister, Leanora, in a production of La Boheme with the Baltimore Lyric Opera in 1976, while a member of the Children’s Chorus of Maryland.

David’s opera appearances spanned the late 1990s and early 2000s. He sang the dual role of Don Basilio / Don Curzio in Bayshore Lyric Opera’s 1997 production of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, and Lloyd St. Pierre in David Scott Marley’s 1999 Berkeley Opera production Daughter of the Cabinet. He then premiered the role of The Pilot in Mark Alburger’s 2000 opera The Little Prince. He has also portrayed Haemon in Alburger’s Antigone, and Alan Shepard in Dave Meckler’s Tocatta di Luna: Apollo 14. He also sang in opera choruses for the City Opera Theater (Janacek’s Jenufa) and two Lamplighter Gala productions.

Since his opera days, Saslav has focused on solo recital work. He has performed recitals throughout the Bay Area with pianist Melissa Smith and other collaborators, and has created CDs with Smith (The Story of Babar, music by Poulenc) and his parents (Nancy Bloomer Deussen’s The World is a Butterfly’s Wing for tenor, piano and viola). Other recordings featuring his voice have been produced by the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Bach Choir, Musaic (two different CDs), the MIT Logarhythms, the California Bach Society, and Chorus Cappella of Orinda, the latter two including his solo work. Since 2009, he can be heard annually in free public recital, onstage at the Fortnightly Music Club in Palo Alto, CA, singing songs of Duparc, Quilter, Bach, Schubert, Beethoven, Dale Victorine, Sondra Clark, and others.

He founded Ora*Cappella, an all-employee-based a cappella singing group at Oracle Corporation, and directed it from 1994-2006; he works full-time at Oracle as a member of the North American Sales’ Business Intelligence organization.

Saslav’s instrumental and vocal compositions number in the dozens and are available freely upon request, his creative writing and essays are freely available at David’s blog, The SazBlog, and his music reviews have run in various publications, including 21st Century Music, San Francisco Classical Voice, and The Tech (the MIT Campus newspaper, archived at this index of David’s Reviews).

He most recently served for eight years as the Tenor Soloist and Assistant Conductor at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California.