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  New York Festival of Song Premieres 'NYFOS Next'

  October 27, 2009

  New York Festival of Song (NYFOS, www.nyfos.org) the acclaimed company founded by Steven Blier and Michael Barrett, which celebrates American song literature and specializes in premiering and commissioning new American works, announces the premiere of NYFOS Next, a concert series which offers performances of new and rarely-heard works in an intimate setting. The first concert in the NYFOS Next series, Water Colors, Velvet Shoes and Twinkies, led by Benjamin Sosland (the series’ Artistic Director, who also sings and serves as master of ceremonies for Water Colors) takes place Sunday November 1 at 5 PM at 45 Walker Street (#5), New York, NY 10013 (between Broadway and Church Streets), and refreshments will be served. Tickets are $10, $5 for students. For tickets, RSVP requested: nicole.halton@nyfos.net, or 646-230-8380. Limited seating, cash or check accepted at the door. The next event will be during spring 2010, TBA.
  
  
  
  NYFOS Next offers a forum for the next generation of song composers and interpreters to share their work. It will give audiences an intimate look inside the creative process, as freshly-minted songs are presented—some for the first time—in the warm atmosphere of a private residence. With an emphasis on spontaneity, novelty, and collaboration between performers and composers, the NYFOS Next series offers a private, experimental venue for song, paralleling the adventurous course of parent company New York Festival of Song, whose concerts have graced recital halls and theaters in New York City for over two decades, and continue in co-presentation with Merkin Concert Hall at Kaufman Center.
  
  Benjamin Sosland, who enjoys an active singing career in opera and concert, is also Research Associate and Program Editor for New York Festival of Song, Administrative Director of Historical Performance at The Juilliard School and a pre-concert lecturer at Carnegie Hall. Recent performance engagements include concerts of Bach cantatas with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at the Metropolitan Museum and the role of the Evangelist with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. His operatic repertoire includes the role of Der Soldat in of Victor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis at the Spoleto (Italy) Festival and Anfinomo in Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria and Gomatz in Zaide, both at the Aldeburgh Festival. Mr. Sosland sang in the U.S. premiere of the Respighi version of Monteverdi’s Orfeo at the Wintergreen Music Festival, and made his debut with L’Opéra Français de New York in Rameau’s Castor et Pollux. He has performed Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge with musicians from the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and has been the guest of several summer music festivals including Ravinia, Marlboro, Aspen, and Bowdoin.
  
  Program: NYFOS Next Katharine Dain and Camille Zamora, sopranos Benjamin Sosland, tenor Jonathan Estabrooks, baritone Ulla Suokko, flute Evan Fein, Lydia Brown, and Cory Smythe, piano Franghiz Ali-Zadeh Three Watercolors for Soprano, Flute and Prepared Piano (1987) 1) Preludium 2) The Narcissus (no.1) 3) The Boatman (no.2) 4) Interludium 5) Expectation (no.3) 6) Postludium Evan Fein Three Icelandic Songs (2009) Að vera of seinn Sál mín svífur burt Í Bárujárns Braki Raymond Lustig Velvet Shoes (2007) Philip Lasser Parisian Evening (2001) Renee Favand-See Laurels, from Lonesome Songs (2009) from Simple Daylight (1988) John Harbison Somewhere a Seed Odor Carson P. Cooman Seven Haiku, Op. 629 (2005) Stefan Weisman Twinkie, from Non-Fiction (2005)
  
  Composers: Franghiz Ali-Zadeh is an Azerbaijani composer and pianist, best known for her works which combine the musical tradition of the Azerbaijani mugam and twentieth-century western compositional techniques. Her works have been performed by Yo-Yo Ma and the Kronos Quartet.
  
  Carson P. Cooman’s works range from solo instrumental pieces to operas, orchestral works to hymn tunes. His music appears on over twenty-five recordings, including ten complete CDs on the Naxos, http://www.naxos.com, Albany, http://www.albanyrecords.com/Artek, http://www.artekrecordings.com, and Zimbel, http://www.zimbel.com labels. As an active concert organist, Cooman specializes in the performance of new music. Over 130 new works have been composed for him by composers from around the world, and his performances of the work of contemporary composers can be heard on a number of CD recordings.
  
  Renée Favand-See’s recent works are Gathered Whole (2009), commissioned by Wet Ink Ensemble; Lonesome Songs (2008), commissioned by soprano Alissa Rose; and Compass (2007), commissioned by cellist Ha-Yang Kim. She has collaborated with numerous artists and ensembles, and her music has been heard at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, Joe’s Pub, American Opera Projects at South Oxford Space, Opera Index, Outer Voices, HERE Arts Center and WGBH Radio Boston.
  
  Evan Fein is the recipient of awards from the ASCAP Foundation and grants from Meet the Composer. His works have been featured at the Cleveland Public Theatre and on public radio, choreographed by performers from the Juilliard Dance Division and the Cleveland Contemporary Dance Theater, have been commissioned by organizations including The Juilliard School and the Albany Symphony, and performed by ensembles including the Vesuvius String Quartet and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony.
  
  John Harbison, best known for his operas and large choral works, has also composed several symphonies, string quartets, and concerti for violin, viola, and bass viol (double bass). He won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1987 for The Flight into Egypt, and in 1998 he was awarded the 4th Annual Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities. In 2006 he was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance for his Mottetti di Montale. The Metropolitan Opera commissioned Harbison's The Great Gatsby to celebrate Maestro James Levine's 25th anniversary with the company. The opera premiered in 1999, conducted by Levine and starring Jerry Hadley, Dawn Upshaw, Susan Graham, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Mark Baker, Dwayne Croft, and Richard Paul Fink.
  
  Philip Lasser recently received the Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His music has been performed by the Seattle Symphony, Gerard Schwarz and The New York Chamber Symphony and by such artists as Elizabeth Futral, Simone Dinnerstein, Lucy Shelton, and Sasha Cooke. In addition, his works have been broadcast on network television and featured on WQXR radio’s Reflections From the Keyboard and The Listening Room, and on NPR.
  
  Raymond Lustig is a 2009 winner of the prestigious Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His orchestral work UNSTUCK—inspired by dementia and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five—was the 2007 winner of the ASCAP Foundation’s Rudolf Nissim Prize. His works have been performed by American Opera Projects, the Juilliard Symphony, the Da Capo Chamber Players, and at Alice Tully Hall, the 92nd Street Y, Symphony Space, and the Norfolk and Caramoor summer music festivals.
  
  Stefan Weisman’s “soundscapes” were described by Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times as "personal, moody and skillfully wrought." His opera Darkling, commissioned by American Opera Projects, was included in the Guggenheim Museum's Works & Process series, premiered to great acclaim at the Classic Stage Company and toured Europe in 2007. His one-act opera Fade premiered in London in 2008, and also had successful productions in Philadelphia, San Francisco and Brooklyn.
  
  Performers Pianist Lydia Brown has performed as a soloist and chamber musician, appearing with such orchestras as the New Orleans Symphony, the Toledo Symphony and the Targu-Mures Philharmonic of Rumania. A Presidential Scholar in the Arts, she has performed at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Phillips Gallery, 92nd St. Y, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Alice Tully Hall, the Theatre des Champs-Elysées and the Aspen Music Festival.
  
  Katharine Dain, praised by The New York Times for her “rich tone, emotion and lovely, passionate stage presence,” regularly sings with such ensembles as the Collegiate Chorale, The Mark Morris Dance Group and the New York City Ballet. She has premiered pieces by Stockhausen and Gervasoni, and co-founded Lunatics at Large, a contemporary group called “young, energetic and highly polished” by Allan Kozinn, and Callisto Ascending, an early music group that performs at major festivals.
  
  Jonathan Estabrooks, as soloist and featured artist, has appeared with the Juilliard Orchestra, the Israeli Chamber Orchestra, The National Arts Center Orchestra under the baton of Pinchas Zukerman, and has sung for members of the United Nations, Governor General and Prime Minister of Canada and President Bill Clinton. Prominent operatic roles have included: Papageno in Die Zauberflöte, Tarquinius in The Rape of Lucretia, Shaunard in La Bohème, and Belcore in L’elisir d’amore.
  
  Cory Smythe – As a member of the new music group International Contemporary Ensemble, he has contributed to many premieres, worked with composers Philippe Hurel and David Lang among others, across the U.S. and abroad. His recent performance of solo piano music by Magnus Lindberg was praised by the Boston Globe for its “grace and intensity.” He recently made his Carnegie Weill Hall debut with violinist Sung-Ju Lee.
  
  Ulla Suokko, as soloist and chamber musician, has been featured at Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Merkin Hall and Miller Theater, appearing at the Lincoln Center Festival, American Composers' Orchestra concerts, Museum of Modern Art Summergarden series among others. Her international tours include Tashkent, Uzbekistan; Ulan Bator and Gobi desert, Baku, Azerbaijan; Tbilisi, the Georgian Republic; and Tokyo, Japan. She can be heard regularly throughout the New York area, and has been broadcast many times on WNYC radio.
  
  Camille Zamora, called "A singer blessed with intense communicative ability who blazes with passion," (Opera Magazine) has performed with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the Rochester Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra (in its educational outreach program), the Apple Hill Chamber Players, and in live recital broadcasts on National Public Radio, BBC Radio, and Deutsche Radio. Recent opera debuts include Ermione (Oreste) Or at the Spoleto Festival di Due Mondi, Despina (Così fan tutte) at Glimmerglass Opera, Amore/Valetto (L'Incoronazione di Poppea) in Graham Vick’s critically acclaimed production at the Houston Grand Opera, and Rosita to Placido Domingo’s Vidal in the grand zarzuela Luisa Fernanda, with the Los Angeles Opera.
  
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  New York Festival of Song’s upcoming concerts include Great American Songwriting Teams (November 17 and 19) with Broadway and cabaret’s Mary Testa, Sylvia McNair and Jason Graae; Killer B’s: American Song From Amy Beach To the Beach Boys (January 13), the fifth annual NYFOS@Juilliard at The Juilliard School; The Voluptuous Muse (February 16 and 18) a survey of the last vestiges of lush tonality and decadent Romanticism at the dawn of the 20th century; the first great flowering of French art song performed by America’s brightest new vocal stars in The Sweetest Path, part of the Caramoor Vocal Rising Stars program, March 13 at Caramoor and March 16 at Merkin Concert Hall; and The Newest Deal (May 4 and 6) featuring recent American works, including the premiere of the Harold Meltzer song cycle Beautiful Ohio*, created for and performed by Paul Appleby. 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, including the double bill of Bastianello / Lucrezia, which premiered in 2008. They have 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, and the Bridge Records release of the NYFOS program Spanish Love Songs. NYFOS’s concert series, touring programs, radio broadcasts, recordings, and educational activities have sparked a new interest in the creative possibilities of the song program, and have inspired the creation of thematic vocal series around the world. NYFOS’s New York City concert series is funded, in part, by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and by the New York State Council on the Arts. *Beautiful Ohio is commissioned by the ASCAP Foundation Charles Kingford Fund. The second season of the Caramoor Vocal Rising Stars program will be underwritten, in part, by The Terrance W. Schwab Fund for Young Vocal Artists. Paul Appleby appears with the cooperation of The Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. ###