Three NYC Organizations Commemorate 50 Years Since The Stonewall Uprising With Two Concerts
NYFOS's Manning The Canon in 2010, courtesy of Matthew Murphy.
Five Boroughs Music Festival (5BMF), in collaboration with the New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) and the LGBT Community Center (The Center), will celebrate WorldPride in two programs featuring LGBT composers and librettists, both commemorating 50 years since the Stonewall uprising.
NYFOS Next: Laura Kaminsky & Friends
Tuesday, June 11, 2019 at 7:30 PM at The CenterManning The Canon: Songs Of Gay Life
Tuesday, June 25, 2019 at 7:30 PM at The Center
The first program, entitled NYFOS Next: Laura Kaminsky & Friends, features a salon of contemporary art songs by women composers and librettists, curated by composer Laura Kaminsky. The concert includes the world premiere of After Stonewall, a song cycle by Kaminsky, Kayla Cashetta, Jennifer Higdon, Laura Karpman, Paula Kimper, and Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, set to poems by Elaine Sexton. The program will also feature the New York premiere of Fierce Grace: Jeannette Rankin with libretto by Kimberly Reed and contributions by Kaminsky, Karpman, Kitty Brazelton, and Ellen Reid, performed by mezzo-soprano Heather Johnson and pianist Mila Henry.
The second program, entitled Manning The Canon: Songs Of Gay Life, features a quartet of vocalists – Daniel Mcgrew (tenor), Scott Murphree (tenor), Efraín Solís (baritone), and Matt Bohler (bass) – in a musical portrait of life, love and loss in the world of gay men. The program, which originally premiered at 5BMF in 2009, includes songs by Poulenc, Tchaikovsky, Griffes, Bernstein, Porter, Blitzstein and more.
Tickets range from $15 to $50 and can be purchased at the Five Boroughs Music Festival’s website.
About Laura Kaminsky
Laura Kaminsky, “one of the top 35 female composers in classical music” (The Washington Post), frequently addresses issues including sustainability, war, and human rights in her work. “Full of fire as well as ice, (she writes) in an idiom that contrasts dissonance and violence with tonal beauty and meditative reflection" (American Record Guide). With co-librettists Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed, she has created the most widely-produced contemporary opera in the U.S., As One (2014), as well as Some Light Emerges (Houston Grand Opera 2017), and the forthcoming Today It Rains (Opera Parallèle/American Opera Projects 2019). Upcoming: a Piano Quintet for Ursula Oppens and the Cassatt String Quartet; and with Kimberly Reed, Postville, inspired by the unprecedented and devastating immigration raid there in 2008, for a consortium led by Santa Fe and San Francisco Operas. She is head of composition at the Conservatory of Music/SUNY Purchase.