On Nov. 17 and 19, a concert called Great American Songwriting Teams will feature "a program of famous and rarely-heard songs in honor of America's classic songwriting collaborators: the Gershwin brothers, Dietz & Schwartz, Rodgers & Hart, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Lerner & Loewe, Bock & Harnick, Kander & Ebb, Leiber & Stoller, Bolcom & Weinstein and others."

Performers will include New York stage and NYFOS favorites Sylvia McNair and Broadway's Mary Testa (42nd Street, On the Town, Guys and Dolls) with Steven Blier at the piano. Additional artists to be announced.

Single tickets go on sale Aug. 15. For more information about the season, visit www.nyfos.org.

*

New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) "is dedicated to creating intimate song concerts of great beauty and originality, weaving music, poetry, history and humor into unforgettable evenings of compelling theatre, entertaining, educating and creating community among performers and audiences in a spirit of shared adventure." In 1988, pianists Michael Barrett and Steven Blier founded New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) to produce this series of unique song programs, each unified by a theme, drawing together rarely-heard songs of all kinds, overriding traditional distinctions between "high" and "low" performance genres, "exploring the character and language of other regions and cultures, and the personal voices of song composers and lyricists."

Since its founding, NYFOS has particularly celebrated American song, featuring premieres and commissions of new American works, and has produced five recordings on the Koch label, including a Grammy Award-winning disc of Bernstein's "Arias and Barcarolles," as well as the Grammy-nominated recording of Ned Rorem's "Evidence of Things Not Seen" on New World Records.