Long story short, or long story long, for this week I thought it would be nice to celebrate that love and bring to the fore a few composers with truly unique and ‘vocal’ voices that HAVEN’T yet been featured on NYFOS programs. That also helps me simplify my list since NYFOS has done so many contemporary works and premieres! 🙂 So let me start with Caroline Shaw. I can have the fan girl moment and say we went to Rice together- same class actually, back when she was just incredibly brilliant and a violinist. Now a Grammy-winner and the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer, Caroline is doing unbelievable, truly revelatory things with music.
Read MoreAnd now we come to Manhattan Transfer, or what we later came to refer to as just “the Transfer”. What an amazing run they had- 35 years of great tight harmony, jazz, standards and brilliant singing and smart, urbane musicianship. Just four singers, sometimes a piano or a small band. They didn’t need much accompaniment. If they are new to you, get their albums.
Read MoreSteve Blier flipped for their brilliant part writing and wacky take on the quirkier aspects of human frailty and eccentricity. (Just check out “Through the Wall”) . We’ve included lots of their songs on Nyfos programs over the years, and they inevitably have an immediate effect on the audience.
Read MoreIt’s Tuesday. It’s really hot this July. Tempers are flaring, folks are getting violent (though I’ve read that crime is down 50% over the past 20 years). Politics looks like some wierd version of “Survivor”. What we need is something cool and uplifting. Take 6, who emerged in the late 1980’s has always been my favorite a cappella boy band.
Read MoreThis week I want to share singing groups that I think really defined their time. I can’t do them all. The Andrews sisters sure made their mark, and captured their full share of fame, but maybe we won’t have time for them. But let’s start with Lambert Hendricks and Ross (Dave, Jon and Annie).
Read MoreI heard Theo Bleckmann perform Duet For One at a Bar Mitzvah, his gift to the initiate. He is both performer and composer here; the music displays his extraordinary vocal range, not to mention stamina.
Read MoreI was twenty-three and living in Cambridge, England. My new soprano friend Amanda Dean introduced me to the music of Judith Weir through a wonderful performance of her 1979 monodrama King Harald’s Saga. “Harald” is described as a grand opera in three acts with an overall duration of slightly under ten minutes. And it’s a monodrama in the purest sense, in that the solo soprano is unaccompanied by instruments. Weir’s incisive blend of wit and drama recreates the foolhardy expedition of a Norwegian king to conquer England.
Read More“Love’s a hand-me-down brew” in these blues. Who would spurn Peggy Lee when she sings so languorously? Born Norma Deloris Egstrom in North Dakota, Peggy Lee had a voice that to me could do just about anything. But be sexy. At least to me.
Read MoreOkay, perhaps on another beautiful day in Berkshires I shouldn’t wave goodbye so quickly to summer. Igor Severyanin’s poem beholds daisies in perfect summer bloom, and Rachmaninoff doesn’t hold back.
Read MoreThis week I am in the Berkshires, preparing for a performance at Tanglewood of my Variations on a Summer Day, songs which in part were previewed on the NYFOS Next series two years ago. Songs about summer, and about mountains, spring to mind. I am numbering these days of perfection, sad for them to end but already making plans for the fall. Over and again I am hearing Robert Schumann’s song Des Sennen Abschied, to Friedrich Schiller’s poem, their farewell to the willows and wells of water and flowers of the season.
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