New York Festival of Song Presents Beginner's Luck – The Artist's Journey on March 20

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PR Contact: Katlyn Morahan | Morahan Arts and Media
katlyn@morahanartsandmedia.com | (646) 378-9386

New York Festival of Song Presents 
Beginner's Luck – The Artist's Journey
at Kaufman Music Center on March 20

Highlights the Talents of Caramoor’s 2025 Schwab
Vocal Rising Stars Program

www.nyfos.org

February 11, 2025 (New York, NY) — New York Festival of Song (NYFOS), led by Artistic Director Steven Blier, highlights the talents of Caramoor’s 2025 Schwab Vocal Rising Stars program in Beginner’s Luck: The Artist’s Journey on Thursday, March 20, 2025 at 8:00 p.m. at Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center. He is joined by the program’s Co-Director, pianist Bénédicte Jourdois. 

Featuring a wide-ranging playlist from German Lieder to Bob Dylan, the program explores the chaotic decade between adolescence and adulthood, filled with seemingly endless possibility and endless peril. A cast of five brilliant young artists, all in their 20s – soprano Chea Kang, mezzo-soprano Kate Morton, tenor Reed Gnepper, baritone Jamal El Titi, and pianist Zoë Zhou – will collaborate with co-directors Bénédicte Jourdois and Steven Blier in this intriguing musical journey.

A preview performance takes place on Sunday, March 16, 2025 at 3:00 p.m. at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts.

Now in its 17th year, the annual weeklong Schwab Vocal Rising Stars residency program at Caramoor includes daily coaching, rehearsals, and workshops with Steven Blier and guest teaching artists. Notable alumni of the program include soprano Julia Bullock, tenor Paul Appleby, soprano Corinne Winters, baritone John Brancy, soprano Joélle Harvey, baritone Theo Hoffman, and many more.

All NYFOS programming is funded, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

The NYFOS Mainstage and the NYFOS Next series are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Concert Information
Beginner’s Luck: The Artist’s Journey - Preview Performance
Sunday, March 16, 2025 at 3:00 p.m.
Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts | 149 Girdle Ridge Road | Katonah, NY 10536
Tickets: $15 - $49
Link: https://caramoor.org/event/schwab-vocal-rising-stars-spring-2025/ 

New York Festival of Song: Beginner’s Luck: The Artist’s Journey
Thursday, March 20, 2025 at 8:00 p.m.
Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center | 129 W 67th St | New York, NY 10023
Tickets: $20 - $79; Students $10; also available as part of NYFOS Spring 2025 Season 3-Concert Subscription package
Link: https://www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/mch/event/new-york-festival-of-song-beginners-luck-the-artists-journey/ 

*Tickets include access to a complimentary reception with the artists in the upper lobby after the show

Program (subject to change):
Works by Fauré, Busoni, Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, Grieg, Wolf, Berg, Ned Rorem, Stephen Sondheim, Charles Ives, Paul Moravec, William Bolcom, Marc Blitzstein, George Gershwin, Jason Robert Brown, Thad Jones, and Bob Dylan

Artists:
Chea Kang, soprano
Kate Morton, mezzo-soprano
Reed Gnepper, tenor
Jamal El Titi, baritone
Zoë Zhou, piano
Steven Blier, piano
Bénédicte Jourdois, piano

About Bénédicte Jourdois
French pianist and vocal coach Bénédicte Jourdois is a member of the Metropolitan Opera music staff and teaches and coaches at the Juilliard School and the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. With Steven Blier, she co-directs the Schwab Vocal Rising Stars program at Caramoor.

Ms. Jourdois has performed in numerous venues in Europe and in the United States, including Alice Tully Hall and Carnegie Hall in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. As a coach and pianist, she has worked with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Chicago Lyric Ryan Opera Center, Chicago Opera Theatre, Pittsburgh Opera, Washington National Opera, Washington Concert Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Palm Beach Opera, Opera Saratoga, Rice University, the Chautauqua Institution voice program, the Castleton Festival, Spoleto Festival USA, and Carnegie Hall’s SongStudio. She was previously a faculty member at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and at the Manhattan School of Music.

Born in Paris, Ms. Jourdois holds degrees from the Conservatoire National de Region de Saint-Maur, the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Lyon, Mannes College, and the Juilliard School and is a graduate of the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at The Metropolitan Opera.

About New York Festival of Song
Now in its 37th season, New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) is dedicated to creating intimate song concerts of great beauty and originality. Weaving music, poetry, history, and humor into evenings of compelling theater, NYFOS fosters community among artists and audiences. Each program entertains and educates in equal measure. 

In January of 2022, NYFOS Records issued its first album, From Rags to Riches, with Stephanie Blythe and William Burden. At the end of January they are set to release their sixth album, Schubert/Beatles, with Theo Hoffman, Julia Bullock, Kunal Lahiri, and Mr. Blier. The new CD joins NYFOS Records’s burgeoning discography, alongside A Picnic Cantata (2022), the first stereo recording of a hidden gem by Paul Bowles and James Schuyler; Black & Blue (2023), the debut solo album of British-American tenor Joshua Blue collaborating with Steven Blier; Mi País: Songs of Argentina (2023) featuring bass-baritone Federico De Michelis and pianist and Steven Blier; and NYFOS Records: The Singles, Vol. 1 (2024), a wide-ranging compilation drawn from over 20 years of archival material, including tracks featuring Michael Spyres, Justin Austin, and Bernarda Fink. NYFOS Records has reached rapidly growing audiences in over 100 countries, with well over 2.5 million streams to date. 

Founded by pianists Michael Barrett and Steven Blier in 1988, NYFOS continues to produce its series of thematic song programs, drawing together rarely-heard songs of all kinds, overriding traditional distinctions between musical genres, exploring the character and language of other cultures, and the personal voices of song composers and lyricists.

Since its founding, NYFOS has particularly celebrated American song. Among the many highlights is the double bill of one-act comic operas, Bastianello and Lucrezia, by John Musto and William Bolcom, both with libretti by Mark Campbell, commissioned and premiered by NYFOS in 2008 and recorded on Bridge Records. In addition to Bastianello and Lucrezia and the 2008 Bridge Records release of Spanish Love Songs with Joseph Kaiser and the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, NYFOS has produced five recordings on the Koch label, including a Grammy Award-winning disc of Bernstein’s Arias and Barcarolles, and the Grammy-nominated recording of Ned Rorem’s Evidence of Things Not Seen (also a NYFOS commission) on New World Records. In 2014, Canción Amorosa, a CD of Spanish song—Basque, Catalan, Castilian, and Sephardic—was released on the GPR label, with soprano Corinne Winters accompanied by Steven Blier.

In November 2010, NYFOS debuted NYFOS Next, a mini-series for new songs, hosted by guest composers in intimate venues, including OPERA America's National Opera Center, National Sawdust, the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, the Ann Goodman Recital Hall at Kaufman Music Center, and now the Rubin Museum in Chelsea.

NYFOS is passionate about nurturing the artistry and careers of young singers, and has developed training residencies around the country, including with The Juilliard School’s Ellen and James S. Marcus Institute for Vocal Arts (now in its 17th year); Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts (its 17th year in March 2025); San Francisco Opera Center (over 20 years as of February 2018); Glimmerglass Opera (2008–2010); and its newest project, NYFOS@North Fork in Orient, NY.

NYFOS’s concert series, touring programs, radio broadcasts, recordings, and educational activities continue to spark new interest in the creative possibilities of the song program, and have inspired the creation of thematic vocal series around the world.

About Steven Blier
Steven Blier is the Artistic Director of the New York Festival of Song (NYFOS), which he co-founded in 1988 with Michael Barrett. Since the Festival’s inception, he has programmed, performed, translated and annotated more than 150 vocal recitals with repertoire spanning the entire range of American song, art song from Schubert to Szymanowski, and popular song from early vaudeville to Lennon-McCartney. NYFOS has also made in-depth explorations of music from Spain, Latin America, Scandinavia and Russia. New York Magazine gave NYFOS its award for Best Classical Programming, while Opera News proclaimed Blier “the coolest dude in town” and in December 2014, Musical America included him as one of 30 top industry professionals in their feature article, “Profiles in Courage.”

Mr. Blier enjoys an eminent career as an accompanist and vocal coach. His recital partners have included Michael Spyres, Renée Fleming, Cecilia Bartoli, Samuel Ramey, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Susan Graham, Jessye Norman, and José van Dam, in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to La Scala. He is also on the faculty of The Juilliard School and has been active in encouraging young recitalists at summer programs, including the Wolf Trap Opera Company, the Steans Institute at Ravinia, Santa Fe Opera, and the San Francisco Opera Center. Many of his former students, including  Julia Bullock, Stephanie Blythe, Sasha Cooke, Paul Appleby, Dina Kuznetsova, Corinne Winters, and Kate Lindsey, have gone on to be valued recital colleagues and sought-after stars on the opera and concert stage. In keeping the traditions of American music alive, he has brought back to the stage many of the rarely heard songs of George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Kurt Weill and Cole Porter. He has also played ragtime, blues and stride piano evenings with John Musto. A champion of American art song, he has premiered works of John Corigliano, Paul Moravec, Ned Rorem, William Bolcom, Mark Adamo, John Musto, Richard Danielpour, Tobias Picker, Robert Beaser, Lowell Liebermann, Harold Meltzer, and Lee Hoiby, many of which were commissioned by NYFOS.

Mr. Blier’s extensive discography includes the premiere recording of Leonard Bernstein’s Arias and Barcarolles (Koch International), which won a Grammy Award; Spanish Love Songs (Bridge Records), recorded live at the Caramoor International Music Festival with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Joseph Kaiser, and Michael Barrett; the world premiere recording of Bastianello (John Musto) and Lucrezia (William Bolcom), a double bill of one-act comic operas set to librettos by Mark Campbell; and Quiet Please, an album of jazz standards with vocalist Darius de Haas, and Canción amorosa, a CD of Spanish songs with soprano Corinne Winters. His latest releases for NYFOS Records include Black & Blue (2023), with British-American tenor Joshua Blue; Mi País: Songs of Argentina (2023) with bass-baritone Federico De Michelis; and NYFOS Records: The Singles, Vol. 1 (2024), a compilation of guest artists performing together with Steven Blier, spanning over 20 years of memorable moments and voices.

A native New Yorker, he received a Bachelor’s Degree with Honors in English Literature at Yale University, where he studied piano with Alexander Farkas. He completed his musical studies in New York with Martin Isepp and Paul Jacobs. Mr. Blier is a Yamaha Artist.

Photo at top of release Cherylynn Tsushima 

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