by Steven Blier | Oct 16, 2026 | Program Notes
On a car ride home from Caramoor last spring, Bénédicte Jourdois and I were brainstorming about themes for the coming season. I had what I thought was a cockamamie idea for a season opener, sure to be shot down by my colleague. Just to get it off my chest, I...
by Steven Blier | Apr 2, 2026 | Program Notes
NYFOS has had a history of making schidduch—arranged marriages—between seemingly odd-couple composers. Some years ago, I began with a concert of Schubert and Jerome Kern (done out of town, one half devoted to each); in town, we had a rousing success interleaving...
by Steven Blier | Feb 10, 2026 | Program Notes
Some program ideas emerge in a single moment of inspiration. Fugitives had such a birth: it sprang into being one night in June of 2007, when I was onstage with Kate Lindsey at Wolf Trap. We were doing a concert of German songs from the Weimar years called Berlin...
by Steven Blier | Nov 18, 2025 | Program Notes
The idea for this program came to me last spring when I was having tea with the two singers in tonight’s cast, Shelén Hughes Camacho and Joseph Parrish. While pursuing independent careers on the world’s concert halls and opera houses, spanning from Carnegie Hall...
by Steven Blier | Apr 8, 2025 | Program Notes
Most of this year’s NYFOS programs have been tied to earthly concerns—societal, cultural, psychological, political. After the tumult of past few months, though, some of us might be feeling that the world is too much with us—or more aptly, that the world is too much...
by Steven Blier | Mar 17, 2025 | Program Notes
Beginner’s Luck is a musical snapshot of a precarious moment of arrival: those early years of adulthood with all of their new responsibilities, which might include the beginning of a career or the start of a new family. It is precisely the stage of life where our cast...
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