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Program notes for Tain't Nobody's Business If I Do: Songs of Gay HarlemThursday, December 12 at Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center My first awareness of Harlem’s gay subculture came from an unlikely source: a Cole Porter song I heard decades ago called “The Happy...
Kurt Weill and Marc Blitzstein may not have been bosom buddies, yet their art was so intertwined as to make them indispensable to one another. Weill’s musical tropes are at the heart of Blitzstein’s “The Nickel Under the Foot,” the song that launched his breakout...
The New York Festival of Song opened its doors for business 32 years ago. Bolstered by a great passion for song, the generous good will of our friends, and a thousand-dollar gift from our first benefactor Joe Machlis, Michael Barrett and I mounted our first season in...
Our final subscription concert is set for March 17. It’s called The Art of Pleasure, a show I first devised at Wolf Trap and later repeated in Long Island. This time it will come out of our collaboration with Caramoor’s Vocal Rising Stars program, an annual art song...
Our continuing preview of this year’s concerts continues with a peek at Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do: Songs of Gay Harlem, set for December 12. After the dizzying success of last year’s tribute to W. C. Handy, I wanted to get the team together again as soon as...
Continuing my preview of our fall concerts: Silverlake and No For an Answer, November 19 at Merkin Hall. Michael and I both had a hankering to revive NYFOS' tradition of presenting rare theater pieces in concert versions. Kurt Weill's "Silverlake" was a feature of...