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Artistic Director Steven Blier is giving concerts and classes through the summer, including an upcoming July 17 master class with the San Francisco Opera's Merola Program.
His next project will be a concert at Wolf Trap (Vienna, Virginia) on August 1, with a cast drawn from the resident artists of Wolf Trap Opera: The Pursuit of Love, a compendium of song cycles and quartets by Heitor Villa-Lobos, Edvard Grieg, Enrique Granados, and Stephen Sondheim. One of the evening's musical highlights will be Gabe Kahane's instant classic, Craigslistlieder, written in 2006. The program features tenor Paul Appleby, who won the Metropolitan Opera Auditions this past spring.
Following this, Mr. Blier performs Latin Lovers: An Evening of Cuban and South American Song at Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, New York. Latin Lovers, which was presented at The Julliard School last season, features songs by Carlos Guastavino, Astor Piazzolla, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Ernesto Lecuona, and many others. The cast for Latin Lovers will once again include the brilliant mezzo-soprano Rebecca Jo Loeb.
Associate Artistic Director Michael Barrett - who also serves as Chief Executive and General Director of the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts - is keeping busy with the annual summer festival up in Katonah, NY.
In addition to the Bel Canto at Caramoor concerts (July 17 and 31), Barrett will conduct Erik Satie's Sports and Divertissements on July 25 with Steven Goldstein (of NYFOS' February 2009 Voices of the Jewish Diaspora) and Michelle Ellsworth, as a curtain-raiser to Peter and the Wolf. Jazz singer Dianne Reeves sings August 1, and Brazilian jazz vocalist Luciana Souza on August 2.
New York Festival Of Song will open its 22nd season on October 13 at Merkin Concert Hall at Kaufman Center in New York City, and present concerts encompassing music of Broadway, opera, blues and art song. For more information, visit www.nyfos.org
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New York Festival of Song was founded in 1988 by Steven Blier and Michael Barrett. NYFOS is dedicated to creating intimate song concerts of great beauty, humor and originality, combining music, poetry, and history to entertain, educate and create community among audiences and performers. With a far-ranging repertoire of art songs, concert works and theater pieces, its thematic recitals have included programs from Brahms to the Beatles, from the nineteenth-century salons of Paris to Tin Pan Alley, from Russian art song to Argentine tangos, from sixteenth-century lute songs to new music. NYFOS particularly celebrates American song literature and culture, and specializes in premiering and commissioning new American works.
