AOP and Phoenix Concerts Present 'AOP25: Celebrating Composers & the Voice' Concert Tonight
By: BWW News Desk Oct. 11, 2013
The primary focus of Composers & the Voice is to give emerging composers and librettists experience working collaboratively with singers on writing for the voice and contemporary opera stage. Previous fellows in the Composers & the Voice program have gone on to receive numerous awards, commissions, and premieres, including Jack Perla (Love/Hate, San Francisco Opera, 2012), Gregory Spears (Paul's Case, UrbanArias, 2013, and Pittsburgh Opera, 2014), Stefan Weisman (Darkling, AOP commission, NYC, 2006), Hannah Lash (Aspen Music Festival), Daniel Felsenfeld (Nora, In the Great Outdoors, AOP commission, NYC, 2011), Daniel Sonenberg (The Summer King, Fort Worth Opera Frontiers, 2013), and Vivian Fung (2013 Juno Award "Classical Composition of the Year"). A complete list of alumni can be found at AOP's website,
www.operaprojects.org/composers_voice.htm.
2013 marks the 25th anniversary of Brooklyn's AOP, an originator of new opera and music theatre. In addition to The Phoenix Concerts, other AOP partners include PROTOTYPE Festival, Irondale Ensemble Project, UrbanArias, Opera on Tap, Manhattan School of Music and more, presenting new works and music from our catalogue of the past quarter century. The season began with a sold-out world premiere run of Lera Auerbach's The Blind at Lincoln Center Festival and will include another world premiere in April 2014 at Roulette, The Wanton Sublime (music by Tarik O'Regan, libretto by Anna Rabinowitz), in partnership with Ear Heart Music and The American Music Ensemble.
ARTIST BIOS:
Gilda Lyons (C&V 2005-06), composer, vocalist, and visual artist, combines elements of renaissance, neo-baroque, spectral, folk, agitprop Music Theater, and extended vocalism to create works of uncompromising emotional honesty and melodic beauty. Tom Strini of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel descrbies her Nahuatl Hymn for treble choir (Clarion CLCD-936) as "hair-raising, yet elegant [with] slides, dips, yips and yelps amid ceremonial intensity." Recent premieres in Beijing, Tokyo, Seattle, New York, and Pittsburgh include walk, run, fly (voice/pre-recorded sound; The Flea, NYC), Lady Beetle (koto solo; Yumi Kurosawa, Torifony Hall, Tokyo),Moonlight Suite (chamber opera; Opera Theater of Pittsburgh), Hold On (voice/piano; Adrienne Danrich, Thomas Bagwell; AIDS Quilt Song Book at Twenty), Invocations (voice and shakuhachi; Kyo-Shin-An Arts) and La Novia de Tola (piano trio; Beijing New Music Ensemble, Beijing; Finisterra Trio, Seattle). Currently writing an opera for Opera Theater of Pittsburgh on the life of Rachel Carson with a libretto by Tammy Ryan, she is also completing large-scale commissions for Mirror Visions Ensemble and IonSound. Composer-in-Residencies include Vermont's New Music on the Point (2013); Seasons Music Festival (2009-present); and Hartford Women Composers Festival (2011). An active vocalist and fierce advocate of contemporary music, Dr. Lyons has commissioned, premiered, and workshopped new vocal works by dozens of composers. Of her performance in Daron Hagen's Shining Bow (Buffalo Philharmonic/Falletta) (Naxos) David Shengold of Opera, UK writes "Gilda Lyons' clear soprano compels admiration." www.gildalyons.com
Conrad Cummings (C&V 2005-06) composes opera, symphonic music, chamber music, and music for his ensemble of amplified instruments and voices. His works have been performed at Carnegie Hall, Brooklyn Academy Of Music (BAM), Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and numerous clubs and alternative performance spaces. Groups performing his music including Brandywine Baroque, Avian Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Louisville, New Jersey, and Indianapolis Symphonies, and the San Francisco Opera Center. Recent commissions include Shakespeare in Loves, settings of sonnets for Brandywine Baroque, In Memoriam, Marge Laszlo, a tribute to the Roller Derby star for Avian Orchestra's All-Sports event, The Passing Months, for French soprano saxophonist Daniel Gremelle, premiered in Taiwan, and Reunion for P and J for pianist James Baker and clarinetist Paul Green. Since the early 1990's, Cummings has worked as a freelance composer, director, and interactive media producer in New York City. He's particularly proud of the award-winning games for kids he has produced at Hyperspace Cowgirls. Conrad Cummings serves on the faculty of the Juilliard School where he teaches composition in the Evening Division. Among his many honors are MacDowell, Djerassi, and Tanglewood Fellowships and grants from the Ditson Fund, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation, Opera America, and the National Endowment for the Arts. CRI's Emergency Music label has released four recordings of Cummings' music. www.conradcummings.com
Composer Daniel Felsenfeld (C&V 2006-07) has been commissioned and performed by Simone Dinnerstein, Two Sense, Metropolis Ensemble, American Opera Projects, Opera on Tap, Great Noise Ensemble, Da Capo Chamber Players, ACME, ETHEL, REDSHIFT, Two Sides Sounding, Momenta Quartet, Friction Quartet, Blair McMillen, Stephanie Mortimore, Jennifer Choi, Caroline Widmann, Cornelius Duffallo, Jody Redhage, Nadia Sirota, Caroline Worra, Elanor Taylor, Kathleen Supové, Jenny Lin, Ensemble 212, New Gallery Concert Series and Transit, at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, BAM, Kennedy Center, ATLAS, Le Poisson Rouge, City Winery, Galapagos Art Space, The Stone, The Kitchen, BAM, Jordan Hall, Duke University, The Southern Theatre, Stanford University and Harvard University, as part of 21c Liederabend, Opera Grows in Brooklyn, Ecstatic Music Festival, MATA, Keys to the Future, and Make Music New York. He has also worked with Jay-Z, The Roots, Keren Ann, Rick Moody, Stew, Mark Z. Danielewski, and is the court composer for John Wesley Harding's Cabinet of Wonders. Commercially available on the Sony, Def Jam, Black Box, and Naxos labels. Raised in the outlying suburbs of Los Angeles, he lives in Brooklyn. She, After, a pairing of two of Daniel's AOP-developed monodramas - Alice in the Time of the Jabberwock and Nora, In the Great Outdoors, will be premiered by UrbanArias (Arlington, VA) this fall.
Juno Award-winning Canadian composer Vivian Fung (C&V 2003-04)has distinguished herself as a composer with a powerful compositional voice, whose music often merges Western forms with non-Western influences such as Balinese and Javanese gamelan and folk songs from minority regions of China. In 2012, Naxos Canadian Classics released the world premiere recording of Ms. Fung's Violin Concerto, Piano Concerto Dreamscapes, and Glimpses for prepared piano, with Metropolis Ensemble conducted by Andrew Cyr, featuring violinist Kristin Lee and pianist Conor Hanick. The Violin Concerto earned Ms. Fung a 2013 Juno Award for "Classical Composition of the Year". Several of Ms. Fung's works have also been released commercially on the Telarc, Cedille, and Signpost labels. Ms. Fung has received numerous awards and grants, including the 2012 Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts' Gregory Millard Fellowship, ASCAP, BMI, American Music Center, MAP Fund, Music Alive!, and the League of American Orchestras, American Composers' Forum, and the Canada Council for the Arts. She has been composer-in-residence of the Delaware Chamber Music Festival, Music in the Loft chamber music series in Chicago, the San Jose Chamber Orchestra, and the Billings Symphony. Vivian Fung also completed residencies at the MacDowell, Yaddo, and Banff arts colonies, as well as residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Ms. Fung is also an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre. www.vivianfung.ca
Hannah Lash (C&V 2005-06) has emerged as a leading voice of her generation. A prize-winning composer, she has received the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fromm Foundation Commission, a fellowship from Yaddo Artist Colony, the Naumburg Prize, the Barnard Rogers Prize, the Bernard and Rose Sernoffsky Prize, and numerous academic awards. She has received commissions from The Fromm Foundation, The Naumburg Foundation, The Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival, The Orpheus Duo, The Howard Hanson Foundation, Case Western Reserve's University Circle Wind Ensemble, MAYA, Great Noise Ensemble, and the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble. Her orchestral music has been singled out by the American Composers Orchestra for the 2010 Underwood New Music Readings with Furthermore, and by the Minnesota Orchestra, which selected her work God Music Bug Music for performance in January 2012 as part of the Minnesota Composers Institute. Her chamber opera, Blood Rose, was presented by NYC Opera's VOX in the spring of 2011. Lash's music has also been performed at Carnegie Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, the Chelsea Art Museum, Harvard University, Tanglewood Music Center, the Times Center, and the Chicago Art Institute. Lash obtained a bachelor's degree in composition from the Eastman School of Music, her PHD from Harvard University, a performance degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, and an Artist Diploma from the Yale School of Music. Her primary teachers include Martin Bresnick, Bernard Rands, Julian Anderson, and Robert Morris. Her music is published by Schott. Lash serves on the composition faculty at Yale School of Music. www.hannahlash.com
The voice of EMMY award winning soprano Adrienne Danrich has been described as "fresh liquid-silver", "radiant", and "meltingly tender in its high, floating vulnerability" by Opera News. She has performed leading roles with San Francisco Opera, Opera Pacific, Cincinnati Opera, Sarasota Opera, Dayton Opera, Kentucky Opera, Skylight Opera Theater, Lyric Opera San Antonio and Fort Worth Opera. She performed with Kenya Opera in various venues throughout Nairobi and Mombasa. Ms. Danrich made her solo debut at Carnegie Hall with the New England Symphonic Ensemble and her Alice Tully Hall debut with The Little Orchestra of New York. Most recently, Ms. Danrich made the debut of two operatic title roles- Aida with Annapolis Opera and Tulsa Opera and Madama Butterfly with the Imperial Symphony Orchestra. On the concert stage, Ms. Danrich has performed with the San Francisco Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, The Orchestra of St. Luke's Outreach, Cape Cod Symphony, Lexington Philharmonic, Bryan Symphony, St. George's Choral Society, Dayton Philharmonic, Northern Kentucky Symphony, Fort Wayne Philharmonic, Louisville Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony, Laredo Philharmonic, Hartt Symphony, and Hamilton Farfield Symphony. In addition to singing concerts and recitals around the country, Ms. Danrich performs her self-described 'live documentary' and one-woman show, This Little Light of Mine: The Stories of Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price, which she wrote under a commission from Cincinnati Opera. Ms. Danrich recently won an EMMY for her performance in the televised version of This Little Light of Mine, which was filmed by Milwaukee Public Television (MPTV). Cincinnati Public Television (WCET) filmed a different and original version of This Little Light of Mine, which was aired in 2012. In February 2011, Ms. Danrich performed the premiere of her new live documentary, An Evening in the Harlem Renaissance, which she wrote under a commission from the Lively Arts Concert Series at Indiana University Pennsylvania and has since performed the show with Cincinnati Opera, Taft Museum, and The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Nicole Mitchell (mezzo-soprano) is a proud native of Brooklyn, New York. She has performed regularly with American Opera Projects and The Walt Whitman Project extensively promoting the works of New York composers. Most notably wa s the song cycle Songs from the F Train composed by Gilda Lyons and joint-commissioned by American Opera Projects and The Walt Whitman Project. These songs were performed at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall. This past summer Nicole performed in the New York premiere of Lera Auerbach's opera The Blind in an AOP & Lincoln Center Summer Festival production. Ms. Mitchell has performed at Avery Fisher Hall and with New York City Opera and Sarasota Opera where she sang the role of Tituba in Robert Ward's Pulitzer Prize-Winning opera The Crucible, later reprising the role with Piedmont Opera (2012) at the request of the composer. As a Tanglewood Vocal Fellow (2008) she sang for Maestro James Levine and performed as one of the Six Ladies while covering the role of Leocadja Begbick in Kurt Weill's The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. In February 2013, Nicole gave a recital at Brooklyn Navy Yard Center's BLDG 92 Museum. She was officially the second operatic voice heard at the Navy Yard since Eugenia Farrar's 1907 radio broadcast. Next year Nicole will appear in David Lang's work The Difficulty of Crossing a Field (Beth Morrison Projects 2014). In addition to contemporary compositions, Ms. Mitchell's concert work as alto soloist includes Verdi's Requiem, Brahms' Alto Rhapsody, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony & Choral Fantasy, Handel's Messiah, Rossini's Stabat Mater and Mozart's Requiem to be performed later this month with at The Colour of Music Festival in Charleston, SC. She also has experience in film, television and radio.
Mila Henry is a New York-based pianist who specializes in contemporary opera, musical theater, and chamber music. She is Resident Music Director with American Opera Projects (AOP), where she recently served as Assistant Conductor for The Blind (Lincoln Center Festival 2013) and music directs for their Composers & the Voice workshop series with conductor Steven Osgood. Frequent collaborators include OPERA America, Beth Morrison Projects (BMP), HERE, Gotham Chamber Opera, American Lyric Theater, Opera on Tap, and Center City Opera Theater. Current projects include Kamala Sankaram's contemporary opera-theatre work Thumbprint(PROTOTYPE 2014); the chamber music series Atmospheric Shift: Music of the Elements with Two Sides Sounding; Stefan Weisman's The Scarlet Ibis with BMP and HERE, in association with AOP; and Nkeiru Okoye's folk opera HARRIET TUBMAN: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom with AOP. Mila holds degrees from the Manhattan School of Music and Elizabethtown College. She lives in Brooklyn. http://milahenry.com
ABOUT THE PRODUCERS:
Since 2005, THE PHOENIX CONCERTS, New York's "plucky Upper West Side new-music series" (The New Yorker), has commissioned, premiered, and presented over one hundred contemporary composers' works on nearly fifty concerts in Manhattan, Beijing, Saratoga Springs, and Seattle. Thousands of additional listeners have been reached through streaming videos, visuals, and program notes on its comprehensive website (www.thephoenixconcerts.org) as well as rebroadcasts on WUOL 90.5 FM, Louisville, Kentucky's Fine Arts Station. THE PHOENIX CONCERTS' unwavering commitment to presenting the broadest possible spectrum of new music draws enthusiastically supportive audiences comprised largely of first-time concertgoers. Catered post-concert receptions offer an informal setting where audiences interact with performers and composers. Building from a core season of four concerts presented at Manhattan's Church of St. Matthew & St. Timothy, the calendar includes collaborative events hosted in partnership with: Beijing New Music Ensemble; Chamber Music America; Hudson Opera House; Lotte Lehmann Foundation; Beth Morrison Projects; Salon Harlem; Seasons Music Festival; "Composers Now" Festival at Symphony Space; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and the Corporation of Yaddo.
At the forefront of the contemporary opera movement for a quarter century, AOP (American Opera Projects) creates, develops and presents opera and music Theatre Projects collaborating with young, rising and established artists in the field. AOP has produced over 20 world premieres including most recently Lera Auerbach's The Blind, a co-production with Lincoln Center Festival 2013. Other notable premieres include Kimper/Persons' Patience & Sarah (1998), Stefan Weisman'sDarkling (2006), Lee Hoiby's This is the Rill Speaking (2008), and Phil Kline's Out Cold (2012) at BAM. AOP-developed projects premieres with collaborating companies: Gregory Spears'sPaul's Case at UrbanArias 2013, Kamran Ince's Judgment of Midas at Milwaukee Opera Theatre 2013, Jack Perla'sLove/Hate at ODC Theater with San Francisco Opera, 2012, Stephen Schwartz's Séance on a Wet Afternoon at New York City Opera, 2011, Tarik O'Regan's Heart of Darkness at London's Royal Opera House 2011, Jorge Martín's Before Night Falls at Fort Worth Opera, 2010, Hoiby's This Is the Rill Speakingat Opera Memphis 2013.
Upcoming: 7th season of Composers and the Voice, AOP-commissioned The Wanton Sublime and Nora, In the Great Outdoors. www.operaprojects.org
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