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I’ve been thinking about bel canto the past few days. Usually the term refers to a fertile era in Italian opera at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Composers like Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini used long-lined melody and bravura passagework to tell their...
My friend Becca Jo’s challenge to stop telling her what performances I didn’t like, and instead show her what I did like, has stayed with me. Ever since our conversation last Friday I’ve been pondering: where does my own heart lie? What is my musical home base? I’ve...
This week I find myself floating around in what feels like a weightless state, after four months of unremitting pressure. Almost all of the NYFOS subscription concerts fell into the autumn season, along with the preparations for the Juilliard concert in January. We...
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...