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| | Tenor Ben Bliss and pianist Christopher Allen open our season with a celebration of American song in all its variety — from Broadway wit to concert-hall lyricism, folk-inflected balladry to poetic art song.
The evening ranges freely across the American songbook, threading together the theater music of Sondheim, Rodgers and Hart, Bernstein, and Weill with the songs of Ives, Barber, and Liebermann, and the setting of poets as distinct as E. E. Cummings, Langston Hughes, and Allen Ginsberg. It’s a program that moves with ease between the bright patter of numbers like “The What-Cha-Ma-Call-It” and the aching intimacy of “Lonely House”—music that captures both the exuberance and the tenderness at the heart of the American voice.
Bliss brings to this repertoire a voice of exceptional beauty — bright, focused, and capable of extraordinary refinement — along with a natural feel for the wit, swagger, and vulnerability this music demands, whether he’s channeling Sondheim’s restless “Being Alive,” or the sly nostalgia of “One for My Baby.” Expect an evening that is as much a portrait of a nation’s music as it is a showcase for one of the outstanding tenors of his generation.
With Christopher Allen — a collaborative pianist and conductor of rare gifts and long experience at the highest levels of the art form — at his side, this is an opening night to savor and to celebrate. | Buy Tickets |
| | Tenor Matthew Polenzani and pianist Ken Noda bring their celebrated artistry to an intimate and searching evening of song at the French Embassy. Opening with Franz Schubert's Schwanengesang, the composer's final and perhaps most profound gift to the song repertoire. This cycle, whose title evokes the legendary swan's last song before death, moves through landscapes of longing, loss, and transcendence, setting texts by Heine and Rellstab with visionary intensity. Together, Polenzani and Noda explore every shade of this journey, a collaboration illuminating both the aching vulnerability and the quiet, inexorable beauty that make Schwanengesang an enduring pinnacle of song.
The second half of the program turns to the rich warmth of the Italian tradition, with a selection of songs and arias by Francesco Cilea, Ildebrando Pizzetti, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Gaetano Donizetti, and Francesco Paolo Tosti. From the passionate ardor of the verismo masters to Tosti's incomparable gift for melody and Pizzetti's quietly spiritual lyricism, this is music that speaks directly to the heart. Polenzani — one of the most admired tenors of his generation — brings to these works a voice of honeyed beauty and rare expressive intelligence, while Noda's piano ensures that voice and piano speak with one voice. | Buy Tickets |
| | The Perman Emerging Artist Recital series welcomes soprano Amanda Batista and a Vocal Arts favorite, pianist Myra Huang, in a vibrant and sun-drenched program celebrating the rich traditions of Spanish and Latin American song. Ranging across the Iberian peninsula and the Americas, the evening's repertoire draws on a remarkable constellation of composers — Xavier Montsalvatge, Ernesto Lecuona, Manuel Fernández Caballero, Héctor Campos Parsi, and Carlos López Buchardo, among others — whose music weaves together folk melody, rhythmic vitality, and an irresistible warmth of spirit. These are songs that dance and sigh, that conjure moonlit plazas and tropical breezes, and that reward listeners with some of the most immediately beguiling music in song.
Batista brings to this colorful program a voice of natural radiance and expressive charm, matched by Huang's sensitive and stylistically assured pianism. Together, they share the storytelling from a body of music that remains too rarely heard on the concert stage. | Buy Tickets |
| | songSLAM DC is a unique opportunity for 10 composer/performer teams to premiere new art songs and compete for $2000 in cash prizes. Each team presents a new song of 5 minutes or less for voice and one other instrument in any language.
The voting audience then, in the poetry slam tradition, votes on their favorites, and prizes are awarded to the first, second, and third prize winners. | Buy Tickets |
| | Mezzo-soprano Natalie Lewis and pianist Myra Huang invite audiences on a journey of remarkable range and emotional depth, spanning the Romantic heartland of Brahms and Mahler to the profound American spiritual tradition. The program opens with Brahms's irresistible Zigeunerlieder — his exuberant settings of Hungarian Romani poetry that crackle with rhythmic fire, tenderness, and an almost improvisatory sense of abandon — before turning to the orchestral richness of Mahler's songs, works of searing introspection and visionary scope that seem to contain entire worlds within them.
Huang, whose accompaniments are marked throughout by elegance and keen musical intelligence, proves an ideal partner across every idiom on this rich and deeply satisfying program. | Buy Tickets |
| | Baritone Huw Montague Rendall and pianist Carrie-Ann Matheson present an evening of searching song, opening with Ralph Vaughan Williams's beloved Songs of Travel — settings of Robert Louis Stevenson's poetry that follow a wanderer's journey through the English countryside and beyond. The program continues with Jonathan Dove's Three Love Songs, works of lyricism and harmonic freshness from one of Britain's most gifted and approachable contemporary composers, before turning to Arnold Schoenberg's Vier Lieder — intimate and harmonically adventurous songs that find the composer at a pivotal moment of transition, one foot still in the lush world of late Romanticism, the other reaching boldly toward a new musical language.
The evening culminates in one of the great song cycles of the orchestral repertoire: Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen — Songs of a Wayfarer — here performed in the rarely heard but deeply rewarding version for voice and piano. This aching set, written in the shadow of a lost love, follows its wanderer through grief and fleeting consolation, ultimately finding a kind of bittersweet peace beneath a linden tree. Rendall, whose voice combines natural warmth with keen interpretive intelligence, is ideally suited to this music of restless longing, and Matheson's pianism ensures that every nuance and poetic image finds its full expression. | Buy Tickets |
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