NYFOS NEXT: MOHAMMED FAIROUZ & FRIENDS Set for 4/30

On Tuesday, April 30 at 7:00pm, New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) finishes the 2012-13 installment of its contemporary music mini-series NYFOS Next with MOHAMMED FAIROUZ & FRIENDS at Mary Flagler Cary Hall in the DiMenna Center for Classical Music.

Mohammed Fairouz is one of New York's brightest rising stars. Following the NYFOS commission of his song "A Prayer to the New Year," which received its premiere earlier this season on NYFOS's Merkin Hall program Women, Fairouz returns to curate the final NYFOS Next evening of the season.

The hour-long program aims, in the words of Fairouz, to "emphasize the very neglected field of vocal chamber music," with a distinctly cosmopolitan approach to art song, involving text ranging from Arabic, Haitian and Mandarin to contemporary Italian and English.

Contributions from a diverse group of Fairouz's contemporaries, Huang Ruo, Paola Prestini, and Daniel Bernard Roumain, are included alongside three of Fairouz's own works, including "For Victims," his setting of a text by poet David Shapiro for baritone and string quartet. Shapiro will read his poem, written in remembrance of his relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust, as part of the evening.

"This program has a lot of raw human power," says Fairouz. "All the pieces are about memory and remembering in some way, from Huang Ruo's Mandarin setting in memory of his grandmother, to Daniel Bernard Roumain's eulogy for Malcolm X in his Epilogue 1965 and my Arabic setting of Mahmoud Darwish's haunting lullaby sung by a mother to her son who is no longer with her."

Fairouz has been recognized as an "expert in vocal writing" by The New Yorker and as a "post millennial Schubert" by Gramophone Magazine. Straddling Eastern and Western idioms, Fairouz has emerged as a leading musical force of his generation, with works performed at Carnegie Hall, Boston's Symphony Hall, the Kennedy Center and throughout the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Australia.

Singers for the program will be announced shortly; they will be joined by a small chamber ensemble including string quartet, clarinet, and NYFOS associate artistic director Michael Barett on piano. Composer Daniel Bernard Roumain will perform violin on his composition.

Admission to NYFOS Next is $10, or free for NYFOS' Merkin Hall subscribers. Reservations are required and may be made by calling 646-230-8380, emailing info@nyfos.net, or paying by credit card at www.nyfos.org/next.