New Amsterdam Singers to Close Season with POEMS, LETTERS, AND PREMIERES, 5/28

The New Amsterdam Singers (NAS), led by Music Director Clara Longstreth, will present its final concert of the season, titled Poems, Letters, and Premieres,Thursday, May 28, 2015 at 8:00 P.M. at Saint Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church, 554 West End Avenue (at 87th Street). The program will feature the New York City premieres of two major works: Nobody by Michael Dellaira, on poems of Emily Dickinson for chorus and oboe, and Dear Theo by Ben Moore on letters from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo, for a cappella chorus. Wind instruments will also be employed in Cecil Effinger's Four Pastorales for chorus and oboe, and Eric Whitacre's She Weeps Over Rahoon for women's voices and English horn. Andrew Adelson will perform the oboe and English horn parts.

The concert also will include two a cappella cycles in French: Paul Hindemith's Six Chansons on Rilke texts, and Francis Poulenc's Petites Voix on poems by Madeleine Ley for women's voices. NAS tenors and basses will sing French Choruses from Leonard Bernstein's incidental music to the play, The Lark, and Matthew Harris's Drinking Song.

Michael Dellaira's music exploits the qualities of both speech and song, and encompasses genres from folk music to voice synthesis on computers. According to the American critic Eric Salzman, "[Dellaira] has created a personal musical language that combines the harmonic vocabulary and rhythmic interest of rock music with the technical rigor of the best modern classical music." Born in Schenectady, New York, Dellaira was educated in both philosophy and music. His primary teachers were Milton Babbitt, Edward T. Cone, Paul Lansky, and Goffredo Petrassi and Franco Donatoni. In addition, in two residencies at The Composers Conference, he studied with Roger Sessions and Mario Davidovsky.

The music of American composer Ben Moore has been performed by many leading singers, including soprano Deborah Voigt, mezzo-sopranos Susan Graham and Frederica von Stade, tenors Lawrence Brownlee and Robert White, baritone Nathan Gunn, and six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald. Dear Theo is a setting of selected passages from the letters of Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo for SATB chorus. The work weaves together major emotional themes of their 18-year correspondence. Moore graduated from Hamilton College and earned an MFA from The Parsons School of Design. The New Amsterdam Singers performed his The Lake Isle of Innisfree in its concerts in March 2015.

Cecil Effinger, who died in 1990, was a prolific composer who wrote 125 works in all mediums. The Four Pastorales is his best-known work. Effinger was well known in his native Colorado as a composer and college professor and recognized worldwide as the inventor of Music Writer - a typewriter for music notation - and the Tempo Watch, a device for discovering the tempo of a performance as it is played.