Brooklyn Youth Chorus Performs With Harolyn Blackwell, 12/15

The "warm-toned and wonderfully unified" (The New York Times) Brooklyn Youth Chorus-under the direction of founder Dianne Berkun-infuses this holiday season's music calendar with fresh perspective, offering a special free holiday performance with Metropolitan Opera soprano Harolyn Blackwell on Thursday, December 15 at 7:30pm at the World Financial Center's Winter Garden. The program showcases a number of new holiday arrangements to be performed with the international opera singer, in addition to a world premiere from composer Ricky Ian Gordon, I Dream A World, commissioned by the BYC and based on the Langston Hughes poem of the same name.

With his remarkable and steady rise to success over the last decade, Gordon has "established himself as a major composer" (The New Yorker), while being likened in the same breath by The New York Times to Debussy, Ravel, Bernstein, and Sondheim, with music of "unexpected emotional potency in light of its compositional rigor." The piece is scored for children's chorus and soprano solo, piano, violin, viola, cello, bass, and clarinet.

In addition, long-time BYC collaborator and award-winning jazz and classical pianist Joel Martin has created brand new arrangements of traditional and popular holiday songs for this occasion, including What Child is This?, Baby Born in Bethlehem and Silver Bells.

Three of the six Brooklyn Youth Chorus choral divisions will be showcased at this concert: the BYC's renowned Concert Chorus, as well as its Senior Chorus and Young Men's Ensemble. In addition to works by Mozart, Britten, traditional Christmas and Chanukah songs and a wide range of collaborations with Harolyn Blackwell, the concert will also include multiple solos by Ms. Blackwell. Hailed by The New York Times as "deeply expressive" and "impossible to resist," Blackwell's career has spanned from national and international opera houses including the Met, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Teatro Colon de Buenos Aires and the Glyndebourne Festival, to Broadway productions of West Side Story and Candide, to appearing alongside some of the most distinguished orchestras in the US and abroad.

The concert is free and will take place at the World Financial Center Winter Garden located between 225 Liberty Street and 200 Vesey Street in Manhattan.

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