Brooklyn Philharmonic Season to Include Leslie Uggams, Mos Def, Ted Sperling and More

By Adam Hetrick
28 Jul 2011

Mos Def
Mos Def
Photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

Mos Def, Ted Sperling, Leslie Uggams and Sufjan Stevens will participate in the Brooklyn Philharmonic's 2011-2012 season, which will celebrate music from the classics to Harold Arlen, Richard Rodgers and the legacy of Lena Horne.

Offerings of note to theatre fans include Brooklyn Village on March 23-24, 2012, at Roulette. The multimedia theatrical concerts will take inspiration from Francis Guy’s 1820 painting Winter Scene in Brooklyn, and will have libretto by Royce Vavrek, direction by Tony Award winner Sperling (The Light in the Piazza) and feature Mellissa Hughes and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.

It will include selections from Stevens' "BQE," which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2007, as well as Britten, Beethoven and premieres by David T. Little and Sarah Kirkland Snider.

Phillip Lopate: Living in Brooklyn will be offered March 1, 2012 (at the Brooklyn Heights Public Library ) and March 4, 2012 (at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Library). Writer Lopate's evening will incorporate music by Gershwin and Copland.

On June 9 the Philharmonic will present Mos Def, Lena Horne, and the Bed-Stuy Tradition at the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Plaza. Uggams (Thoroughly Modern Millie) will join Def  (A Free Man of Color) in the evening that will mix hip-hop with the musical legacy of Bed-Stuy native Horne and Beethoven. Songs by Cole Porter, Arlen, Rodgers and Hart and Fats Waller will be performed.

For complete programming details, visit BPhil.org.