New York Festival of Song Presents Other Worlds: Songs of Fantasy

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 
Other Worlds: Songs of Fantasy at 
Kaufman Music Center on April 9

www.nyfos.org

March 11, 2025 (New York, NY) — New York Festival of Song (NYFOS), led by Artistic Director Steven Blier, presents Other Worlds: Songs of Fantasy on Wednesday, April 9, 2025 at 8:00 p.m. at Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center. 

Mezzo-soprano Kara Dugan, baritone John Brancy, Grammy Award-winning clarinetist Mark Dover in his NYFOS debut, and pianist Peter Dugan join Blier for a new program that explores the mysteries of the forest, the ocean, and the skies, with songs by Schumann, Spohr, Sibelius, and many others.  

“I don’t dazzle easily,” said Steven Blier, “but I am extremely dazzled by Peter Dugan’s musicianship, imagination, and virtuosity at the piano. Collaborating with him is always a wild ride, and I am thrilled to welcome him back to NYFOS for a program of songs about other worlds—fantasy is one of Peter’s many areas of expertise. With him comes a pair of players beloved to NYFOS audiences: that force of nature known as John Brancy and the exquisite Kara Dugan, as well as a world-renowned clarinetist, Mark Dover, who will be making his NYFOS debut that night.”

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
OTHER WORLDS: Songs of Fantasy
Wednesday, April 9, 2025 at 8:00 p.m.
Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center | 129 W 67th St | New York, NY 10023
Tickets: $10 - $79; Students $10
Link: https://www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/mch/event/new-york-festival-of-song-other-worlds-songs-of-fantasy/

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

Program (subject to change):
Songs by Schumann, Spohr, Sibelius, and others.

Artists:
Kara Dugan, mezzo-soprano
John Brancy, baritone 
Mark Dover, clarinet
Peter Dugan, piano
Steven Blier, piano

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About Kara Dugan
Mezzo soprano Kara Dugan has been praised by The New York Times for her “vocal warmth and rich character.” Her diverse career ranges from baroque oratorio to world premieres. Recent seasons include recitals at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, New York Festival of Song, New York City’s Century Club, Festival Napa Valley, the White Mountains Music Festival with members of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, as well as a seven-show run of American Ballet Theater's production of Christopher Wheeldon and Joby Tablot's Like Water for Chocolate at Metropolitan Opera House.

Ms. Dugan has made debuts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and Buffalo Philharmonic. She performed with the New World Symphony under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas in the world premiere of his Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind and in the New York premiere of the piece at Carnegie Hall. She has performed with the Marlboro Music Festival, Ravinia Steans Institute, Aspen Music Festival, Wolf Trap Opera, and at venues ranging from National Sawdust to Alice Tully Hall.

Her work as a baroque concert soloist began during her studies at The Juilliard School and has taken her on three international tours with Juilliard415 and conductors Ton Koopman, Masaaki Suzuki, and Nicholas McGegan, culminating in a performance as the Soprano II soloist in Bach’s Mass in B minor at the Boston Early Music Festival. Operatic highlights include Cherubino in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Zaida in Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia, and Nireno in Handel’s Giulio Cesare. 

Her love of new music has sparked collaborations with the Albany Symphony performing Michael Daugherty’s This Land Sings, a multi-genre tribute to Woody Guthrie, the title role in American Lyric Theater’s workshop premiere of Working for the Macbeths composed by Johanny Navarro with libretto by Marcus Yi, as well as a performance in a workshop of Ricky Ian Gordon’s Intimate Apparel with Lincoln Center Theater. As an inaugural member of WQXR’s Artist Propulsion Lab, she commissioned and performed the world premiere of In a New York Minute: Miniatures for Voice and Piano, a song cycle highlighting the voices and perspectives of women and everyday New Yorkers.

As a passionate recitalist she performs often with her husband Peter Dugan, pianist and host of NPR’s From the Top. The husband and wife duo were recently featured on PBS Great Performances’ “Now Hear This” and have performed across the United States, including at the Joye in Aiken Festival, Moab Music Festival, Portland Chamber Music Festival, and WQXR’s Greene Space. The duo’s eclectic repertoire has brought them to a wide range of venues from Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater to Sun Valley’s Argyros Theater, where they joined genre-defying string group Time for Three.

Ms. Dugan received her Bachelor and Master of Music Degrees from The Juilliard School. She is a proud recipient of the Novick Career Advancement Grant.

About John Brancy
Grammy-winning Baritone and New Jersey-native John Brancy is a master with “mesmerizing tone,” says OperaWire. This powerhouse graduate of New York’s famed Juilliard School expertly performs across operatic and musical styles. He’s a virtuoso of staged opera, concert performance, and recital. “It’s hard not to be impressed by the beauty of his voice.”

In the 2024/25 season, Brancy will make debuts at the Opéra Comique, Opéra national du Rhin, Théâtre de la Ville de Luxembourg, and Tiroler Festspiele Erl, reprising his acclaimed dual roles of The Artisan and The Collector in Sir George Benjamin’s Picture a Day Like This. He will also return to the Bayerische Staatsoper in Weinberg’s Lady Magnesia, make his role debut as Marcello in La bohème at Opéra de Montréal, and debut with the Austin Symphony performing Carmina Burana.

Already in his young career, Brancy has taken the New York performance world by storm. Since winning the Marilyn Horne Song Competition in 2013, he’s performed multiple times at Carnegie Hall; debuted at Alice Tully Hall with pianist Brian Zeger; debuted with MasterVoices at Jazz at Lincoln Center as Escamillo in Carmen. He also reprised HEROES for NYFOS in collaboration with Charles Yang and Peter and Kara Dugan, and made his Café Carlyle debut with Peter, ushering in a new era of classical cabaret at the famous venue.

Internationally, Brancy’s performances have been hailed across the globe. In the 2023/24 season, he starred in dual roles at the world premiere of Picture a Day Like This by George Benjamin and Martin Crimp, first at the Aix-en-Provence Festival 75th Anniversary and subsequently at London’s Royal Opera House. The Financial Times called him “remarkable,” the Telegraph, “powerful,” and The New York Times noted him as a baritone with “impressive skill — seamless passaggio between the richly resonant depths of his range and a weightless, dreamy falsetto.”

Further performances in the 2023/24 season included concerts with Insula Orchestra at the Barbican Center (Fauré Requiem), Bayerische Staatsorchester in Munich (Weinberg, Lady Magnesia), Oratorio Society of New York at Carnegie Hall (Handel, Messiah; Gordon; The Grapes of Wrath), and at the US Naval Academy (Britten, War Requiem). Additionally, he returned to Festival d’Aix-en-Provence to sing the title role of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria.

Brancy’s collaborations have included conductors Lorenzo Viotti, Helmut Rilling, James Gaffigan, Henrik Nánási, Ken-David Masur, Lawrence Renes, Alexander Prior, Klaas Stok, and Alexander Briger. With a repertoire spanning from Bach to George Benjamin, Brancy has headlined performances with leading orchestras and opera companies, including the LA Phil, San Francisco Symphony, Oper Frankfurt, Boston Symphony, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Pacific Opera Victoria, and Opera Omaha, among others.

In the 2022/23 season, John Brancy made his debut with the Cleveland Orchestra as Jake Wallace in La Fanciulla del West. He took on the role of Franz Wolff-Metternich in the world premiere of La Beauté du Monde, by playwright Michel Marc Bouchard and composer Julien Bilodeau, at Opéra de Montréal; and performed as a soloist with Theater Erfurt in conductor/composer Alexander Prior’s arrangement of Schubert’s Winterreise for orchestra.

Previously, Mr. Brancy made his role debut as Guglielmo in two new productions of Mozart’s Così fan tutte at San Francisco Opera and San Diego Opera, receiving great critical acclaim. He performed Duruflé Requiem and Joseph Canteloube songs with the Milwaukee Symphony under the baton of Ken-David Masur, and debuted Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer with APEX Ensemble in Montclair, NJ.

Mr. Brancy also released a self-produced collaborative album with Avie Records and Vocal Arts DC, The Journey Home: Live from the Kennedy Center, which reunited Mr. Brancy and pianist Peter Dugan in a recital program inspired by the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. He produced the recital as a film which aired on WNET and the PBS app AllArts TV. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune called it “stirring and sobering,” while BroadwayWorld.com called it “timeless.” Brancy also collaborated with Tony Award–winning composer Adam Guettel to create a short film titled Medusa, as part of the song cycle Myths and Hymns, produced by MasterVoices.

His solo and concert recitals have taken him across the New York metro area and around the world, with performances at Royal Concertgebouw, Wigmore Hall, Hugo Wolf Akademie, Société d’art vocal de Montréal, Carmel Bach Festival, and the Kennedy Center. Here at home, he is known as the official anthem singer of Madison Square Garden for NY Rangers NHL Hockey home games.

About Mark Dover
Grammy® Award-winning clarinetist Mark Dover is a man of many horns, maintaining firm roots in classical music while ever-expanding into the vast world of improvised music. Since 2016 he has served as the clarinetist of Imani Winds, and has appeared as a soloist with the Atlanta, Baltimore, and Albany Symphonies, and the American Composers Orchestra. Most recently, Mark was awarded a Grammy as a player and producer for “Best Classical Compendium” at the 2024 Grammy Awards for Imani Winds’ latest release, “Passion for Bach and Coltrane.” His debut album with Imani Winds, “Bruits,” was nominated for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance at the 2022 Grammy Awards.

In 2023 Mark also joined the chamber ensemble yMusic. 2023 highlights include appearances at Carnegie Hall Presents with both Imani Winds and yMusic, NPR’s tiny desk with yMusic, and debuts at La Jolla Music Society and Tippet Rise Arts Center.

Mark joined the chamber music faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in 2021 and also serves on the clarinet faculty at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, and at Queens College, CUNY.

Mark has an extensive background in improvised music. He is a frequent collaborator with Vulfpeck, an American funk band formed in his hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Mark received his Master of Music degree from Manhattan School of Music and his Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Michigan. He is a Buffet Crampon and Vandoren Artist.

About Peter Dugan
Peter Dugan prizes versatility as the hallmark of today’s musician and advocates for a classical music culture that is inclusive and welcoming to all. That approach has manifested in a multifaceted and dynamic career as a pianist, composer, collaborator, and radio host. A musician equally at home in classical, jazz, and pop idioms, Peter has appeared as soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician across North America and around the world—his performance of the Ives Fourth Symphony with the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas was described by the Los Angeles Times as “stunning” and by the San Francisco Chronicle as “fearlessly athletic.” He is heard on radios nationwide weekly as host of NPR’s From the Top; is

an active and passionate collaborator who has toured extensively with violinists Joshua Bell and Charles Yang, and vocalists John Brancy and Kara Dugan (his wife); and is a composer who has performed his own works everywhere from Carnegie Hall to Joe’s Pub and had his arrangements released by Disney .

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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