The New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) presents an annual series of concerts in New York City dedicated to the art of song, classical, modern and popular. In addition, this organization commissions new works and recordings, including the Grammy Award winning recording of Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim...

's Arias and Barcarolles (Koch), and the grammy nominated recording of Ned Rorem

Ned Rorem

Ned Rorem is a Pulitzer prize-winning American composer and diarist. He is best known and most praised for his song settings.-Life:...

's Evidence of Things Not Seen (New World Records).

The festival was founded in 1988 by Steven Blier and Michael Barrett.

For the 100th anniversary of the Juilliard School

Juilliard School

The Juilliard School, located at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, United States, is a performing arts conservatory which was established in 1905...

 in January 2006, NYFOS collaborated on a program featuring "100 Years of Juilliard Composers in Song".

In 2007, NYFOS released a live-recording CD entitled Spanish Love Songs (Bridge), featuring Lorraine Hunt Lieberson

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson was an American mezzo-soprano, known for the dramatic power of her vocal artistry as well as her commitment to performing infrequently-heard Baroque era and contemporary works...

 and Joseph Kaiser

Joseph Kaiser

Joseph Kaiser is a Canadian operatic tenor. In 2005 he won 2nd prize in Placido Domingo's Operalia International Opera Competition. He has performed as a soloist with the New York Metropolitan Opera, making his debut in 2007....

, performing with Blier and Barrett at Caramoor

Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts Inc.

Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts is a former estate near Katonah, New York United States, that has since become a venue for classical music performances and an art museum. Both are legacies of the house's original owners, Walter and Lucie Rosen. The Caramoor International Music Festival is...

. The program was recorded live just before Lieberson's death.

In December 2008, Bridge Records will release an original cast recording of Bastianello / Lucrezia, featuring soprano Lisa Vroman, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, tenor Paul Appleby, baritone Patrick Mason and bass Matt Boehler, with pianists Steven Blier and Michael Barrett. With a score by John Musto and a libretto by Mark Campbell, Bastianello is a family fable of love and folly based on a poignant Italian folk tale. Last March, it had its World Premiere, along with William Bolcom

William Bolcom

William Elden Bolcom is an American composer and pianist. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Medal of Arts, two Grammy Awards, the Detroit Music Award and was named 2007 Composer of the Year by Musical America. Bolcom taught composition at the University of Michigan from 1973–2008...

's comic piece Lucrezia (a version of Machiavelli's La Mandragola, libretto also by Mark Campbell) at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall

Carnegie Hall

Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....

 commissioned and presented by the New York Festival of Song.

Notable Programs

NYFOS has created and premiered over a hundred unique programs, many of which have toured the United States. Some that have been favorably reviewed and/or frequently reprised:

At Harlem's Height, premiered in 2001, explores the music of the Harlem Renaissance

Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke...

, with songs by Eubie Blake

Eubie Blake

James Hubert Blake was an American composer, lyricist, and pianist of ragtime, jazz, and popular music. In 1921, Blake and long-time collaborator Noble Sissle wrote the Broadway musical Shuffle Along, one of the first Broadway musicals to be written and directed by African Americans...

, Fats Waller

Fats Waller

Fats Waller , born Thomas Wright Waller, was a jazz pianist, organist, composer, singer, and comedic entertainer...

, William Grant Still

William Grant Still

William Grant Still was an African-American classical composer who wrote more than 150 compositions. He was the first African American to conduct a major American symphony orchestra, the first to have a symphony performed by a leading orchestra, the first to have an opera performed by a major...

, Florence Price

Florence Price

- Career :Florence Price is considered the first black woman in the United States to be recognized as a symphonic composer. Even though her training was steeped in European tradition, Price’s music consists of mostly the American idiom and reveals her Southern roots...

 and others.

Songs of Peace and War, premiered in 2001, shortly after the World Trade Center attack.

Dvorak and the American Soul, premiered in 2002, juxtaposes songs by Czech composer Antonín Dvořák

Antonín Dvorák

Antonín Leopold Dvořák was a Czech composer of late Romantic music, who employed the idioms of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia. Dvořák’s own style is sometimes called "romantic-classicist synthesis". His works include symphonic, choral and chamber music, concerti, operas and many...

and those of his African-American students from the period in the 1890s when he was teaching at the National Conservatory in New York, showing how each influenced the other.

Blok and Akhmatova: Poets Without Heroes, premiered in 2005, explores music composed around the work of these Russian poets.

2008-2009 Season at Merkin Hall

SEPTEMBER 23 & 25, 2008:
“A Bernstein & Bolcom Celebration”

A tribute to two of New York Festival of Song’s guiding lights, Leonard Bernstein and William Bolcom, quintessential American composers and great spirits who have long provided wisdom, guidance, and songs to NYFOS. Songs from Bernstein's Peter Pan, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Songfest, Wonderful Town, On the Town, Arias and Barcarolles, Mass; Bolcom's Cabaret Songs, I Will Breathe a Mountain, Briefly It Enters, McTeague; and a special appearance by Joan Morris and William Bolcom, who will share signature songs from their repertoire.

NOVEMBER 18 & 20, 2008:
“Fugitives”

An evening of songs from the concert stage, the movies, Broadway, and Berlin’s cabarets that evidence the varied fates of the gifted composers who fled destruction during Hitler’s rise to power—some to begin new lives and brilliant careers abroad, others confronting darker fortunes. Music by Kurt Weill, Franz Schreker, Arnold Zemlinsky, Kurt Tucholsky, Hans Krása, Erich Korngold, Hanns Eisler, Friedrich Hollaender and many others.

FEBRUARY 10 & 12, 2009:
“Voices of the Jewish Disapora”

Songs in many languages trace the culturally diverse Jewish communities that flourished as the tribes of Israel spread out across the globe. Sephardic texts set by Alberto Hemsi and Roberto Sierra; Second Avenue specialties by Irving Berlin and Joseph Rumshinsky; art songs by Ravel, Milhaud and Rubinstein; plus music by Gershwin and Bernstein.

MARCH 17, 2009:
“Songs of the Irish Poets”

The lyricism of the Emerald Isle’s greatest writers, including Thomas Moore, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Paul Muldoon, as set to music by Beethoven, Britten, Balfe, Barber and others; with a group of traditional Irish songs featuring the fiddle playing of Paul Woodiel.

MAY 19 & 21, 2009:
“The Welcome Shore”

A hymn to rivers and oceans stirs the heart and the imagination as the summer season draws near. Music by Elgar (the magnificent Sea Pictures), Fauré, Guastavino, Rachmaninoff, Brahms, Noël Coward, Pauline Viardot and many others.