NYFOS Next Festival to Return with New Song Performances at Rubin Museum of Art

New York Festival of Song, led by Artistic Director Steven Blier, will present its annual NYFOS Next Festival with two performances on Sunday, October 15, 2023 at 3:00 p.m. and Sunday, November 19, 2023 at 3:00 p.m. at the Rubin Museum of Art. The two-concert mini-series for new song, curated by Nathaniel LaNasa, is in its 14th year.

The October 15th concert centers around the themes of frustrated communication, getting lost in translation, being misunderstood on purpose, and the tragedy and comedy of being known and unknown through language. The program features the world premiere performance of We Two, a song cycle by British composer Iain Bell with text by Walt Whitman. With the poet's words living into the future, knowing or yearning for the other and leaving it unspoken, this exciting new work is performed by baritone Gregory Feldmann with curator LaNasa at the keyboard. In addition, soprano Robin Steitz will also appear in Reena Esmail's Rosa de Sal with text by Pablo Neruda from a Spanish poem about self-obliterating love. Soprano Paulina Swierczek performs Andrew Cheung's 2017 All thorn, but cousin to your rose with text by Vladimir Nabakov and others, speaking about the errors and sins of translation. Additional songs on the program include works by composers Gity Razaz, Hilary Purrington, Arlene Elizabeth Sierra, and Nkeiru Okoye.

"This pair of concerts came to be out of a meditation on the limits of speech," LaNasa said. "I've been on a hunt for music and words that reach for the inaccessible. These composers, singers, and songwriters have crystallized small worlds of paradox, incredulity, wonder, and yearning that illuminate surprising-and sometimes unsettling-shared realities."

The series continues on Sunday, November 19, 2023 at 3:00 p.m. with a spotlight on singer-songwriters who come out of the classical tradition. The composer-performers featured include Molly Joyce, a musician whose limited mobility in her left hand has led her to creative and idiosyncratic performance techniques, and made her a powerful advocate for people with disabilities; Dicky Dutton, whose work explores ritual and queer identity in a playfully improvisatory spirit; and Lucy Dhegrae, performing a piece for voice and electronics that fuses her deep background in experimental music with a new relationship to the language and materials of electronic dance music.

Concert Information

NYFOS Next Series at the Rubin Museum of Art
Sunday, October 15, 2023 at 3:00 p.m.
Rubin Museum of Art | 150 W 17th St | New York, NY 10011
Tickets: $25
Link: https://nyfos.org/23-24season/#next

Program:
Andrew Cheung - All thorn, but cousin to your rose (2017)
Text by Vladimir Nabakov and others

Reena Esmail - Rosa de Sal (2020)
Text by Pablo Neruda

Gity Razaz - Song of Acquaintance (2014) and Thirsty Fish (2014)
Bilingual/English translation of Persian love poems

Iain Bell - We Two (2020)
Text by Walt Whitman

Hilary Purrington - de Profundis and I sang (2012)
Text by Christine Rossetti and Carl Sandburg

Arlene Elizabeth Sierra - Look at six eggs (2008)
Text by Carl Sandburg

Nkeiru Okoye - Twenty-eight Bathers (2022)
Text by Walt Whitman

Artists:
Paulina Swierczek, soprano
Robin Steitz, soprano
Gregory Feldman, baritone
Nathaniel LaNasa, piano

NYFOS Next Series at the Rubin Museum of Art
Sunday, November 19, 2023 at 3:00 p.m.
Rubin Museum of Art | 150 W 17th St | New York, NY 10011
Tickets: $25
Link: https://nyfos.org/23-24season/#next

Works to be announced

Artists:
Molly Joyce, performance artist
Dicky Dutton, performance artist
Lucy Dhegrae, mezzo-soprano

Tickets for the NYFOS Next Festival will be available at nyfos.org.

About Nathaniel LaNasa

Pianist, actor, and artist Nathaniel LaNasa lives at the intersection of song, story, and image. He has performed in the sculpture garden at MoMA (New York), in front of his favorite paintings at the Musée d'Orsay (Paris), and at Wigmore Hall (London).

In May 2023 he debuted, Memory Prosthetic, a recital/exhibition which explores the mechanics and aesthetics of music notation by re-notating Bach's Goldberg Variations as a series of graphic scores, which are projected during live performance. In April, he opened his first solo exhibition of paintings in Manhasset. In March, he originated the role of Mel and served as music director for Bryce McClendon's new play, The Smallest Sound in the Smallest Space, off-Broadway in New York.

A consummate collaborator, he has been praised for his "stormy lyricism" (The New York Times) and his "poise and elegance" (Feast of Music). In October 2022, Nate took charge of New York Festival of Song's new music series, NYFOS Next, presenting recitals of songs by living composers at the Rubin Museum. Earlier in 2022, he served as assistant music director and first pianist for Ricky Ian Gordon's new opera for two pianos, Intimate Apparel. He performed the work sixty times at Lincoln Center Theater, as well as on national television for PBS Great Performances.

Nate and baritone Gregory Feldmann made their sold-out Carnegie Hall debut in February 2020. They have since performed together at Royaumont, the Kaufman Center, and on live radio for France Musique. Nate has also partners extensively with vocalist Lucy Dhegrae; they have performed together as part of the Resonant Bodies Festival and at the American Music Festival (Albany Symphony). Nate has premiered works for quarter-tone pianos by Dimitri Tymoczko at Princeton University, made first recordings of chamber works by Tobias Picker for Tzadik, and workshopped Han Lash's opera "Desire" at Columbia's Miller Theater. Nate is a graduate of the Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music.

About Paulina Swierczek

Praised by the Rochester City Newspaper for her "honeyed tone," the Milbrook Independent for her "attractive, comforting appeal" and by the Boston Globe for "a rich voice that could go in a blink from speaking to soaring" - as well as her "killer side-eye" - soprano Paulina Swierczek is gaining acclaim as vibrant story-teller, combining technical facility with a passion for communication.

Concert highlights include Handel's Messiah, Strauss's Four Songs, op. 27, Beethoven's Egmont, op. 84, Brahms's Ein Deutsches Requiem, Mendelssohn's Lobgesang, Poulenc's Gloria, and Haydn's Lord Nelson Mass. Favorite roles include Brunnhilde (Die Walkure, Siegfried), Therese (Les Mamelles du Tiresias), Fiordiligi (Cosi fan tutte), The New Prioress (Les dialogues des Carmelites), and the Countess Almaviva (Le nozze di Figaro). A Fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center, she has premiered works at the Festival of Contemporary Music, performed with the TMCO (Sieben fruhe Lieder, Chantefleurs et Chantefables) and has been featured in numerous cantatas of J. S. Bach under John Harbison.

Paulina has appeared with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, the Albany Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra Now, the Broad Street Orchestra and the Little Orchestra Society, among others. She is an alumnus of the Tanglewood Music Center, the Meistersinger Program at Pittsburgh Festival Opera, Fall Island Vocal Arts Seminar and SongFest. Paulina has recently also been featured by Sparks and Wiry Cries on the 2022 songSLAM Festival as part of the Songs of Identity Series. She is widely sought for her interpretations of Polish art song, having presented programs hosted by the Universities of Pennsylvania and Rochester and in recital by the Canadian Chopin Society and Downtown Music at Grace.

In the 2022-2023 season, Paulina made her role and company debut as Donna Elvira in Toronto City Opera's production of Don Giovanni, performed a program of Polish art song across New York, and sang arias of Mozart and Bellini with the Union College Orchestra. She was a prize winner of the 2023 Opera Birmingham Competition.

About Robin Steitz

Robin Steitz is a Burmese-American soprano from Washington, DC who has established herself in both contemporary and classical spaces as a sensitive and versatile performing artist. Highlights from recent seasons include performances of 'Flora' in Turn of the Screw (Opera Baltimore); 'Susanna' in Le Nozze di Figaro (OperaDelaware); 'Papagena' in Die Zauberflöte (Northern Lights Music Festival); and 'Giulia' in Rossini's La scala di seta (Opera Southwest). She was a Voice Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center in 2018-19, where she most notably appeared as the 'Cricket' in the American premiere of Richard Ayres' opera The Cricket Recovers, conducted by Thomas Adès. This season, Robin premiered John Andrew Wilhite-Hannisdal's chamber work Bristol Silence at the Motvind Jazz Festival in Oslo, Norway, and looks forward to singing the premiere of Matthew Rickett's complete Swallow Songs with Piano Lunaire in October.

About Gregory Feldmann

Hailed for his "fresh and resonant voice" (Seen and Heard International), baritone Gregory Feldmann is a rising artist on opera and recital stages alike. He is currently a member of the 2023-24 International Opera Studio of Opernhaus Zürich, where he will appear in Verdí's Macbeth, Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, and Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

A passionate recitalist, Feldmann enjoys a "luminous" collaboration with pianist Nathaniel LaNasa (Oberon's Grove). The duo have given recitals in venues worldwide, including Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, the Royaumont Abbey, and the Musée d'Orsay. Their recent project American Icons explores the experiences of people living in the shadows of national monuments and myths, and has featured commissions from composers Shawn Chang, Molly Joyce, Matthew Ricketts, and Jorell Williams. He made his Zürich recital debut with Elaine Fukunaga and Klassifest last June, presenting Time as enemy, time as friend, a lyrical reflection on one's relationship to time's movement with songs by Korngold, Ginastera, Poulenc, and more.

About Molly Joyce

Composer and performer Molly Joyce has been deemed one of the "most versatile, prolific and intriguing composers working under the vast new-music dome" by The Washington Post. Her music has additionally been described as "serene power" (The New York Times), and "unwavering...enveloping" (Vulture). Her work is concerned with disability as a creative source. She has an impaired left hand from a previous car accident, and seeks to explore disability through composition, performance, collaboration, community engagement, and further mediums. Her most recent album, Perspective, featuring forty-seven disabled interviewees responding to what access, care, interdependence, and more mean to them, was released on October 2022 on New Amsterdam Records. The record has been praised by Pitchfork as "a powerful work of love and empathy that underscores the poison of ableism in American culture" and The Wire as a "powerful ongoing project...charged by an intense composer/performer relationship."

The primary vehicle in her pursuit is her electric vintage toy organ, an instrument she bought on eBay that suits her body and engages her disability on a compositional and performative level. Her debut full-length album, Breaking and Entering, featuring toy organ, voice, and electronic sampling of both sources was released in June 2020 on New Amsterdam Records, and has been praised by New Sounds as "a powerful response to something (namely, physical disability of any kind) that is still too often stigmatized, but that Joyce has used as a creative prompt." Additionally, she performed her original songs orchestrated by Christopher Theofanidis with the Albany Symphony and conducted by David Alan Miller, and praised as "ethereal, eerie, magical" by The Daily Gazette.

As a composer and creator, Molly's artistic projects have been presented and commissioned by Carnegie Hall, SXSW EDU, Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, TEDxMidAtlantic, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Bang on a Can Marathon, Danspace Project, deSingel, Americans for the Arts, National Sawdust, Music Academy of the West, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, National Gallery of Art, Classical:NEXT, and featured in outlets such as Pitchfork, eBay, Red Bull Radio, WNYC's New Sounds, and I Care If You Listen. Her compositional works have been commissioned and performed by ensembles including the Minnesota, Vermont, New World, New York Youth, Pittsburgh, Albany, and Milwaukee Symphony Orchestras, Chicago Sinfonietta, Gränslandet Symfonisk Fest (Sweden), as well as the New Juilliard, Decoda, Contemporaneous ensembles, and Harvard Glee Club. She has also written for publications 21CM, Disability Arts Online, Women in Foreign Policy, and is a member of the Americans for the Arts' Artists Committee.

As a collaborator, Molly has worked across disciplines including with media artist Andy Slater, visual artists Lex Brown, Leo Castaneda, Alteronce Gumby, Maya Smira, Julianne Swartz, choreographers Melissa Barak, Kelsey Connolly, Carlye Eckert, Jerron Herman, director Austin Regan, and writers Marco Grosse, James Kennedy, Christopher Oscar Peña, and Jacqueline Suskin. She has also assisted Shara Nova of My Brightest Diamond, including orchestral arrangements for American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and Glenn Kotche of Wilco.

Her debut EP, Lean Back and Release, was released in January 2017 on New Amsterdam Records to much acclaim. Featuring violinists Monica Germino and Adrianna Mateo, the EP was praised as "energetic, heady and blisteringly emotive" by Paste Magazine and "arresting" by Textura. Additionally, Molly's music has been released on thirteen commercial albums, including from pianist Vicky Chow, cellist Nick Photinos, and vocalist Bec Plexus (all on New Amsterdam Records), Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble (on Innova Recordings), NakedEye Ensemble (on New Focus Recordings), cellist Alistair Sung (on 7 Mountain Records), percussionist Ralph Sorrentino (on Ravello Records), and on releases from VONK Ensemble, Party of One, clarinetist Lucy Abrams-Husso, saxophonist Don-Paul Kahl, percussionist Evan Chapman, pianist Brianna Matzke and violinist Hajnal Pivnick's duo album On Behalf.

Molly is a recipient of ASCAP's Leo Kaplan Award, as part of the Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, grants from New Music USA, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Jerome Fund / American Composers Forum, Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, and residencies at AIR Krems an Der Donau, ArtCenter/ South Florida, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, De Link Tilburg, Embassy of Foreign Artists, Grace Farms, Halcyon Arts Lab, Headlands Center for the Arts, Villa Sträuli, Titanik, Surel's Place, Swatch Art Peace Hotel, The Watermill Center, and Willapa Bay AiR.

Molly is a graduate of The Juilliard School (graduating with scholastic distinction), Royal Conservatory in The Hague (recipient of the Frank Huntington Beebe Fund Grant), and Yale School of Music. She holds an Advanced Certificate and Master of Arts in Disability Studies from CUNY School of Professional Studies, has done doctoral studies in artistic research as part of the Dr. Artium program between Graz and Zurich Universities of the Arts, and is an alumnus of the National YoungArts Foundation. She has studied with Samuel Adler, Martin Bresnick, Guus Janssen, David Lang, Missy Mazzoli, Martijn Padding, Christopher Theofanidis, and has served on the composition faculty of New York University, Wagner College, and Berklee Online, teaching subjects including Disability and the Arts, Music Technology, Music Theory, and Orchestration. She is currently a Dean's Doctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia, focusing on Composition and Computer Technologies.

About Dicky Dutton

Curiosity in emotional literacy lies at the heart of baritone and performance artist Dicky Dutton's work. Their collaborations with organizations like Aural Compass Projects, Opera Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Choral Arts Society, Wear Yellow Proudly, Cincinnati Opera, and the Nahant Music Festival highlight the importance of working toward equity and creative joy in themself and surrounding communities.

In an effort to repurpose old religion, Dicky premiered her live ritual in early 2023, UMBRA(EXPECTIT) for voice and recorded electronics, a piece commissioned by the Why Collective's performance art festival "Mixt." In 2022, they collaborated with the ENA Ensemble as lyricist for "Mercury Admits:" a set of songs for soprano and cello commissioned for the Serial Opera & New Songs Series. Dicky has also performed settings of their poetry alongside partner, composer, and collaborator, Michael Lewis, in multiple recitals throughout New York, Philadelphia, and Arizona.

Outside of conceptualizing and performing new works, Dicky remains active as a vocalist in the Opera Philadelphia Opera Chorus, the Philadelphia Choral Arts Society, and as music-director and cantor for the St. Mark's Episcopal Church of Frankford, PA. They continue to exercise their mentoring and teaching abilities as the on-site coordinator through Opera Philadelphia's Teen Voices of the City Ensemble (T-VOCE).

Off stage, Dicky works with Aural Compass Projects as New Works Coordinator and creator/project manager of the organization's annual Emerging Composer's Competition. Most mornings they can be found seated by their bunnies searching for juicy words before a day of teaching and singing in the greater Philadelphia area.

About Lucy Dhegrae

Lucy Dhegrae spent the decade before the Pandemic immersed in contemporary classical and avant-garde music. She worked with Dawn Upshaw at Bard College Conservatory; founded Resonant Bodies Festival; and premiered dozens of works with ensembles and individual collaborators, praised as someone who was "redefining what classical music can be...in thrilling ways" (WQXR). Her parallel journey in this time period with voice loss merged with her musical path in The Processing Series, a four-concert artist residency at National Sawdust, in which she used music to explore vocal recovery. It was in this moment that the Pandemic occurred, and she had time to percolate the question: if recovery from trauma equals regaining a sense of freedom, then what does that freedom feel like for me-not just vocally-but musically and physically? In search of that freedom, she immersed herself in the world of all-night dance raves and became an apprentice in dance music creation. Her dance music has been heralded by such world-famous House music DJs as Acid Pauli, Goldcap, David Sinopoli (of Club Space in Miami), and Chloe Caillet. Her interests in trauma-informed music-making also led her also to Francis Weller's course in Grief Ritual Leadership Training. Her current dream is to create and DJ an all-night grief ceremony (a "Breakup Rave"). For her classical work: lucydhegraevoice.com; for her electronic music: soundcloud.com/xnr-g.

About New York Festival of Song

Now in its 36th season, 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 evenings of compelling theater, NYFOS fosters community among artists and audiences. Each program entertains and educates in equal measure.

Founded by pianists Michael Barrett and Steven Blier in 1988, NYFOS continues to produce its series of thematic song programs, drawing together rarely-heard songs of all kinds, overriding traditional distinctions between musical genres, exploring the character and language of other cultures, and the personal voices of song composers and lyricists.

Since its founding, NYFOS has particularly celebrated American song. Among the many highlights is the double bill of one-act comic operas, Bastianello and Lucrezia, by John Musto and William Bolcom, both with libretti by Mark Campbell, commissioned and premiered by NYFOS in 2008 and recorded on Bridge Records. In addition to Bastianello and Lucrezia and the 2008 Bridge Records release of Spanish Love Songs with Joseph Kaiser and the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, NYFOS has produced five recordings on the Koch label, including a Grammy Award-winning disc of Bernstein's Arias and Barcarolles, and the Grammy-nominated recording of Ned Rorem's Evidence of Things Not Seen (also a NYFOS commission) on New World Records. In 2014, Canción Amorosa, a CD of Spanish song-Basque, Catalan, Castilian, and Sephardic-was released on the GPR label, with soprano Corinne Winters accompanied by Steven Blier.

Their latest endeavor is NYFOS Records, which released its first album (From Rags to Riches, with Stephanie Blythe and William Burden) in January of 2022. They also issue a monthly single, with archival performances by artists such as Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Bernarda Fink, and newly recorded songs by Joshua Blue and Sasha Cooke. NYFOS Records has reached rapidly growing audiences in over 100 countries, with well over half a million streams since the beginning of the year.

In November 2010, NYFOS debuted NYFOS Next, a mini-series for new songs, hosted by guest composers in intimate venues, including OPERA America's National Opera Center, National Sawdust, the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, the Ann Goodman Recital Hall at Kaufman Music Center, and now the Rubin Museum in Chelsea.

NYFOS is passionate about nurturing the artistry and careers of young singers, and has developed training residencies around the country, including with The Juilliard School's Ellen and James S. Marcus Institute for Vocal Arts (now in its 16th year); Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts (its 14th year in March 2022); San Francisco Opera Center (over 20 years as of February 2018); Glimmerglass Opera (2008-2010); and its newest project, NYFOS@North Fork in Orient, NY.

NYFOS's concert series, touring programs, radio broadcasts, recordings, and educational activities continue to spark new interest in the creative possibilities of the song program, and have inspired the creation of thematic vocal series around the world.

About Steven Blier
Steven Blier is the Artistic Director of the New York Festival of Song (NYFOS), which he co-founded in 1988 with Michael Barrett. Since the Festival's inception, he has programmed, performed, translated and annotated more than 150 vocal recitals with repertoire spanning the entire range of American song, art song from Schubert to Szymanowski, and popular song from early vaudeville to Lennon-McCartney. NYFOS has also made in-depth explorations of music from Spain, Latin America, Scandinavia and Russia. New York Magazine gave NYFOS its award for Best Classical Programming, while Opera News proclaimed Blier "the coolest dude in town" and in December 2014, Musical America included him as one of 30 top industry professionals in their feature article, "Profiles in Courage."

Mr. Blier enjoys an eminent career as an accompanist and vocal coach. His recital partners have included Michael Spyres, Renée Fleming, Cecilia Bartoli, Samuel Ramey, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Susan Graham, Jessye Norman, and José van Dam, in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to La Scala. He is also on the faculty of The Juilliard School and has been active in encouraging young recitalists at summer programs, including the Wolf Trap Opera Company, the Steans Institute at Ravinia, Santa Fe Opera, and the San Francisco Opera Center. Many of his former students, including Julia Bullock, Stephanie Blythe, Sasha Cooke, Paul Appleby, Dina Kuznetsova, Corinne Winters, and Kate Lindsey, have gone on to be valued recital colleagues and sought-after stars on the opera and concert stage. In keeping the traditions of American music alive, he has brought back to the stage many of the rarely heard songs of George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Kurt Weill and Cole Porter. He has also played ragtime, blues and stride piano evenings with John Musto. A champion of American art song, he has premiered works of John Corigliano, Paul Moravec, Ned Rorem, William Bolcom, Mark Adamo, John Musto, Richard Danielpour, Tobias Picker, Robert Beaser, Lowell Liebermann, Harold Meltzer, and Lee Hoiby, many of which were commissioned by NYFOS.

Mr. Blier's extensive discography includes the premiere recording of Leonard Bernstein's Arias and Barcarolles (Koch International), which won a Grammy Award; Spanish Love Songs (Bridge Records), recorded live at the Caramoor International Music Festival with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Joseph Kaiser, and Michael Barrett; the world premiere recording of Bastianello (John Musto) and Lucrezia (William Bolcom), a double bill of one-act comic operas set to librettos by Mark Campbell; and Quiet Please, an album of jazz standards with vocalist Darius de Haas, and Canción amorosa, a CD of Spanish songs with soprano Corinne Winters. His latest release is Black and Blue with tenor Joshua Blue, on NYFOS Records. His writings on opera have been featured in Opera News and the Yale Review. A native New Yorker, he received a Bachelor's Degree with Honors in English Literature at Yale University, where he studied piano with Alexander Farkas. He completed his musical studies in New York with Martin Isepp and Paul Jacobs. Mr. Blier is a Yamaha Artist.

Photo credit: Zurich, Shervin Lainez