Baruch Performing Arts Center: NYC premiere of Gregory Spears' "Walden"

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March 13: Baritone Brian Mulligan and pianist Timothy Long perform the New York premiere of Gregory Spears' Walden

Program also includes Dominick Argento's Pulitizer Prize winning From the Diary of Virginia Woolf

“a voice that is rich, secure, and really, really big” –The New York Times

On Wednesday, March 13 at 7:30 pm, straight from its world premiere at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Baruch Performing Arts Center presents Brian Mulligan and Timothy Long performing the NYC premiere of Gregory Spears' song cycle Walden. The program also includes Dominick Argento's From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Tickets are $36 for general admission ($16 for students) and are available at www.baruch.cuny.edu/bpac. Baruch Performing Arts Center is at 55 Lexington Avenue (enter on 25th Street between Third and Lexington Avenues), in Manhattan.

Gregory Spears' opera Fellow Travelers was a sensation at the 2018 Prototype Festival. His latest work, Walden, composed for Brian Mulligan was heralded as "a gripping performance" (The Washington Post) at its world premiere in the Fall. With texts drawn from Henry David Thoreau's classic 1854 book, Walden "speaks with a naked intimacy that’s almost painful" (The Washington Post). The cycle is paired with Dominick Argento's From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, written for Janet Baker in 1974.

Praised for his "velvety, evenly and effortlessly produced baritone and nuance-rich phrasing" (Opera News), Brian Mulligan frequently appears with the world’s leading orchestras and opera companies including the Metropolitan, San Francisco, and Houston Grand Operas. He is joined by pianist Timothy Long, whose "collaboration at the piano [with Mulligan] was so sympathetically symbiotic that it seemed...that a single musical intelligence was at work (The Washington Post)."

CALENDAR LISTING

March 13, 2019 at 7:30 pm

Baruch Performing Arts Center presents:

Brian Mulligan (baritone) & Timothy Long (piano)

Program:

Gregory Spears: Walden *NYC premiere*

Dominick Argento: From the Diary of Virginia Woolf

Baruch Performing Arts Center

55 Lexington Avenue in Manhattan

(enter at 25th Street between 3rd and Lexington Avenues) 

Tickets are $51 for premium seating, $36 for general admission, and $16 for students, and are available at www.baruch.cuny.edu/bpac

Cutting Edge Concerts: February 11, 18, 25

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Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival 

Victoria Bond, Artistic Director

Cutting Edge Concerts' 22nd season features music by Philip Glass, Paul Chihara, Hannah Lash, Amy Beth Kirsten, Victoria Bond and more

February 11, 18, & 25, 2019 at Symphony Space's Leonard Nimoy Thalia in New York City

"...a gift to New Yorkers thirsty for new sounds" - Time Out New York

Victoria Bond's Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival celebrates its 22nd Season with three programs in February 2019 at Symphony Space.

Inspired by Pierre Boulez's series, "Perspective Encounters", the composer and conductor Victoria Bond founded Cutting Edge Concerts in 1998. With more than two decades of concerts, Cutting Edge Concerts has presented over 300 new works by nearly 200 composers. Each program highlights the music of living composers, all of whom attend the concert. Along with performances by world-class ensembles and soloists, each program features on-stage discussions between host Victoria Bond and the composers. CEC has been called "a full-throttle commitment to contemporary music" by Chamber Music America.

February 11, 7:30 pm | Cutting Edge Concerts: Dream Forms

New York-based di.vi.sion piano trio (Kurt Briggs, violin; Matt Goeke, cello; Renee Cometa Briggs, piano) performs Steven Burke's Dream Forms (composed for the di.vi.sion trio), inspired by clairvoyant, lucid and epic dreams. Additional works include Victoria Bond's Other Selves, commissioned by the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival as a ballet based on sculptures by Marjorie Michael; and "Piano Trio No. 2" by Jim Lahti.

February 18, 7:30 pm | Cutting Edge Concerts: New Visions of Cherished Classics

Acclaimed Philip Glass interpreter, pianist Paul Barnes joins forces with Scott Hosfeld (viola), Maria Newman (violin), and Laura Hamilton (violin) for Glass's Byzantine chant-inspired work Annunciation Quintet. The first half also includes the NYC premiere Victoria Bond's Simeron Kremate as well as Maria Newman’s Pennipotenti.

The evening also features a workshop performance of The Adventures of Gulliver, a new opera based on the classic Jonathan Swift tale, with music by Victoria Bond, libretto by Stephen Greco and design and direction by Doug Fitch. The cast includes:

Daniel Klein, baritone; Ariadne Graf, soprano; Sean Christensen, tenor; Yoojin Lee, mezzo-soprano; David Charles Tay, tenor; Jonathan Hare, baritone; and Mark Peloquin, piano.

February 25, 7:30 pm | Cutting Edge Concerts: The Poetry of Places

The Horszowski Trio (Jesse Mills, violin; Paul Wiancko, cello; Rieko Aizawa, piano) is joined by clarinetist Alan Kay, flutist Elizabeth Mann, and soprano Sophia Maekawa for a performance of Paul Chihara's Amatsu Kaze ("heavenly wind"). The work is based on seven Haiku, and Chihara's songs are happy, sad, sexy, witty, and always very lonely.

The evening also features pianist Nadia Shpachenko performing selections from her recently released CD, “The Poetry of Places” - works composed for her by Lewis Spratlan, Harold Meltzer, Hannah Lash, Amy Beth Kirsten, Jack Van Zandt, Victoria Bond, and James Matheson.

Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival concerts are on Mondays, February 11, 18, and 25, 2019 at 7:30 pm at Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Peter Norton Symphony Space (2537 Broadway at 95th Street in Manhattan). Tickets are $20 in advance ($30 day of show) and are available online.

Feb 23: Defiant Requiem performance at IUP

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Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín

Saturday, February 23

at Fisher Auditorium, Indiana PA

Complete live performance of Verdi's Requiem as performed in the Terezín Concentration Camp, interspersed with historic film, testimony from survivors and narration tells the moving story of courageous performances by the prisoners of a WWII concentration camp

Praised by The New York Times as "Poignant...a monument to the courage of one man to foster hope among prisoners with little other solace," Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín will be performed on February 23, 2019 at 7:30 pm at Fisher Auditorium(403 S. 11th Street) in Indiana, PA. 

The "extraordinarily beautiful and moving" concert/drama commemorates the courageous Jewish prisoners in the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp during World War II who performed Verdi's Requiem 16 times, as an act of defiance and resistance to their Nazi captors. Defiant Requiem is a complete live performance of Verdi's Requiem interspersed with historic film, testimony from survivors and narration that tells this tale of audacious bravery. This performance features the full Verdi Requiem with the chorus and soloists accompanied by a single piano, as it was in Terezín.

Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín features pianist Arlene Shrut with Colleen Ferguson on violin, the IUP Chorale and Penn State Altoona Ivyside Pride Vocal Ensemble, as well as soprano Annie Gill, mezzo-soprano Bonnie Cutsforth-Huber, tenor Tim Augustin, and bass Joseph Baunoch and actors Richard Kemp and Michael Schwartz. It will be conducted by Maestro Murry Sidlin, president of The Defiant Requiem Foundation and creator of this powerful concert/drama.

This performance of Defiant Requiem is presented by The Defiant Requiem Foundation, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Department of Music, and the Penn State Altoona Department of Arts and Humanities, with funding from the Gretchen M. Brooks University Residency Project.

Tickets for Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín are $10 general admission, $8 for seniors and $6 for students, anyone with a Military ID, and children under 18. Tickets are available online or in person at the The Lively Arts Ticket Office (in the lobby of the IUP Performing Arts Center, 403 S. 11th Street, Indiana, PA). 

Murry Sidlin and The Defiant Requiem Foundation also produced an Emmy-nominated documentary film narrated by Bebe Neuwirth that has been praised as a "gripping documentary" (Examiner.com), with "a very powerful message" (CNN). More information is at DefiantRequiem.org.