New York Festival of Song Presents South America, North America: A Love Story

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

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New York Festival of Song Presents
South America, North America: A Love Story 

Four-Concert Mainstage Series Co-Presented with
Kaufman Music Center at Merkin Hall Begins November 20 with
Concert Featuring Joseph Parrish and Shelén Hughes

www.nyfos.org

October 21, 2025 (New York, NY) — New York Festival of Song (NYFOS), led by Artistic Director Steven Blier, presents the first concert as part of its Mainstage Series South America, North America: A Love Story on Thursday, November 20, 2025 at 8:00 p.m. at Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center. 

“North America/South America: A Love Story brings together some of the things–and people–I cherish most in my life,” said NYFOS Artistic Director, Steven Blier. “South American music has held a special place in my heart ever since NYFOS’s first season, and so does the music of my own country. They form my artistic home base. Cherished, too, are the artists with whom I am sharing the stage: Bolivian soprano Shelén Hughes, Baltimore-bred baritone Joseph Parrish, and Persian-American pianist Amir Farid, three irreplaceable colleagues and friends. The music ranges freely from folklore to blues, Bernstein to Ginastera—a feast for the ears to open our 38th season.”

Created for American baritone Joseph Parrish and Bolivian soprano Shelén Hughes (partners on- and off-stage) and accompanied by pianists Steven Blier and Amir Farid, this program explores the music of North and South America through the milongas, tangos, blues, and art songs that span the two continents. Audience members are invited to meet the artists at a post-concert reception in the lobby.

NYFOS’s Mainstage season continues on Thursday, February 12, 2026 at 8:00 p.m. with Fugitives, featuring baritone Justin Austin and a guest co-star to be announced later in the season; Steven Blier and Bénédicte Jourdois will be at the piano. A revival of an acclaimed program last heard in 2008, the playlist includes songs from the concert stage, the movies, Broadway, and Berlin’s cabarets, tracing the varied fates of the composers who faced destruction during Hitler’s rise to power—some to begin new lives and brilliant careers abroad, others to meet with darker ends. The concert features works by Kurt Weill, Franz Schreker, Alexander Zemlinsky, Friedrich Hollaender, Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Korngold, Hanns Eisler, and many others.

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.

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Concert Information:

South America, North America: A Love Story
Thursday, November 20, 2025 at 8:00 p.m.
Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center | 129 W 67th St | New York, NY 10023
Tickets: https://kaufmanmusiccenter.org/mch/event/new-york-festival-of-song-south-america-north-america-a-love-story/

Program to Include:
Moisés Moleiro - Joropo  
Eduardo Caba - Flor de bronce 
Hall Johnson - Dusty Road  
Hernani Braga - Engenho novo  
Heitor Villa-Lobos - Viola quebrada  
Carlos Guastavino - Mi viña de Chapanay  
George Gershwin - Promenade 
Bob Telson - Calling You  
Julian Aguirre - Caminito  
Prince - How Come U Don’t Call Me 
Leonard Bernstein - A Julia de Burgos  
Claudio Santoro - Luar de meu bem  
Alberto Ginastera - Canción del beso robado  
Willy Claure - Cantarina  
Trad., arr. Celius Dougherty - Uncle Joe’s Reel 
Carlos López-Buchardo - Copla criolla  

Artists:
Shelén Hughes, soprano
Joseph Parrish, bass-baritone
Steven Blier, piano
Amir Farid, piano

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About Shelén Hughes
Soprano Shelén Hughes is passionate about both music and social service. Raised in Cochabamba, Bolivia, she began her artistic journey as a Bolivian folklore singer and dancer. She is a graduate of The Juilliard School (ADOS) and the Manhattan School of Music (BM & MM).

Ms. Hughes is a winner of the George and Nora Foundation 2025 Competition, third place winner in the 2025 Gerda Lissner Opera Competition, a winner of the 2024 Opera Index Competition, first-place winner of the 2024 Gerda Lissner Zarzuela Competition and the 2024 Dorothy Lincoln Smith Vocal Competition (D.C. chapter). She was a finalist in the 2025 Renata Tebaldi Competition, a semi-finalist in the 2024 Geneva Voice Competition and the 2023 Alfredo Kraus Competition in Gran Canaria. She was also the Sankofa Award recipient of the 2023 SAS Competition and was featured as a soloist in the New York Festival of Song’s curated program Gracias a la Vida.

Previous roles include Pamina in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (Teatro Nacional de Chile), Servilia in Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito (The Juilliard School), Private Sonia Gonzales in Huang Ruo’s An American Soldier (Perelman Performing Arts Center, NYC), Atalanta in Handel’s Atalanta (The Juilliard School), Inez in Mercadante’s I Due Figaro (Manhattan School of Music), Snegurochka in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snegurochka (Manhattan School of Music), Micaëla in Bizet’s Carmen, and Magda in Puccini’s La Rondine. She made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2019 and her NYFOS debut in 2022. She was a young artist at the 2019 Gstaad Menuhin Festival and a 2022 Gerdine Young Artist at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, where she performed Frasquita in Carmen and Ms. Kohl in the premiere of Awakenings.

Future engagements include her debut at Oper Frankfurt and with the Cleveland Orchestra.

Beyond the stage, Ms. Hughes is the founder of Voices for Bolivia, an international non-profit organization dedicated to providing relief for impoverished elderly through classical music.

About Joseph Parrish
Joseph Parrish was a recipient of the 2024 Sullivan Grant, a member of the Salzburger Festspiele Young Singers Project for the 2024 festival season, and a third prize winner in the Opera Index Voice Competition 2024.

??In addition to his achievements on the competition stage, Joseph is a member of the Young Concert Artists roster.??

During the 2024/2025 season, as a Young Concert Artist, Joseph will make his New York City solo recital debut at Kaufman Music Center's Merkin Hall. He joins MasterVoices to sing the role of Earl Mann’s Cellmate/Edward Vernon/Ensemble in Davenport Richards and Cote’s Blind Injustice and Town Hall NYC as James Baldwin in Sneed and Chilton's The Tongue and the Lash. On the concert stage, Joseph performs as bass soloist in Händel’s Messiah with the Oratorio Society at Carnegie Hall, Christus in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion with Musica Sacra, and baritone soloist in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with The Orchestra of St. Luke’s.??

Joseph is an active recitalist, with performances this season at the Cosmos Club in Washington D.C., the Harriman Jewell series in Kansas City, and the Detroit Chamber Music Festival.

Last season, Joseph made his European opera debut with the Salzburg Festival as Potapitsch in Prokofiev's The Gambler and his European solo recital debut at the Usedomer Festival. He also debuted on the main stage with Cincinnati Opera, singing Masetto in Mozart's Don Giovanni, and joined Parlando NYC for a semi-staged production of Rimsky-Korsakov's Mozart e Salieri, as Salieri.

?Previous highlights include the title role in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, Dr. Cajus in Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, and Dulcamara in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore at Juilliard. A champion of both early and modern music, Joseph has sung the roles of Augure in Rossi’s L’Orfeo, Il Sacerdote di Minerva in Händel’s Teseo, and Sodbuster in Mazzoli and Vavrek’s Proving Up. He has also participated in masterclasses with Stéphane Degout, Denyce Graves, and Hartmut Höll.

??Joseph is deeply committed to giving back to the communities that have supported him. He has served as a Music Advancement Program chorus teaching fellow and a Gluck Community Service fellow at the Juilliard School. Additionally, he frequently collaborates with Voices for Bolivia, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of impoverished elderly in Bolivia. Joseph holds degrees from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and the Juilliard School.

About Amir Farid
Winner of the 2006 Australian National Piano Award, US born Iranian-Australian pianist Amir Farid has been described as “a highly creative musician – a pianist of great intelligence and integrity.” Residing in both Melbourne and New York City, Amir has performed as a solo recitalist, concerto soloist and collaborative artist in concert halls and festivals internationally, including Carnegie Hall New York, St. Martin in the Fields London, the New York Festival of Song, Mostly Mozart festival at Lincoln Center New York, Al-Hashemi-II Kuwait, MONA FOMA Festival Hobart, Sidney Myer Music Bowl Melbourne, Coriole Festival SA, Huntington Festival NSW, as well as other venues in Italy, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, New Zealand and China amongst others.

Recital collaborations include tenor Ian Bostridge, saxophonist Claude Delangle, violinists Arabella Steinbacher and Nikki Chooi, violist Lise Berthaud, cellists Mats Lidström, Alexander Baillie and Martin Loveday, sopranos Greta Bradman and Siobhan Stagg, baritone Wolfgang Holzmair, flautist Michel Bellavance and clarinetist Philippe Cuper.  As a chamber musician, Amir is pianist of the Benaud Trio, winning the Piano Trio prize at the 2005 Australian Chamber Music Competition, as well as pianist with the Exponential Ensemble in NYC.  He is also a recorded artist on the Steinway & Sons Spirio catalogue, as part of the piano manufacturer’s revolutionary player-piano system.

Amir has studied with Ronald Farren-Price, Andrew Ball, Geoffrey Tozer, Rita Reichman and Timothy Young, studying at the Royal College of Music, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and the Australian National Academy of Music. While in NYC, Amir is a staff pianist at the Vocal Arts department of the Juilliard School, pianist with the Exponential Ensemble, the Oratorio Society of New York, the New York Choral Society, and has worked as a rehearsal pianist with the New York Philharmonic.

About New York Festival of Song
Now in its 38th 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. 

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 January of 2022, NYFOS Records issued its first album, From Rags to Riches, with Stephanie Blythe and William Burden. In January of 2025, they released 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. 

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 of Shelén Hughes by Titilayo Ayangade; photo of Joseph Parrish by Shervin Lainez

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