Ari Steisfeld, violinist (JACK Quartet) & clarinetist Evan Ziporyn, Bang on a Can founder/composer, join soprano Eileen Clark & pianist Thomas Schmidt in Gregg's Double Sonata (poetry of Herrick & Milton), Fallen Angels (Poetry of Kim Rich), plus Peter Quince at the Clavier (Wallace Stevens).
The New York Times describes Eileen Clark, soprano (click for résumé), as "a knockout" for her interpretation of
Gershwin and Porter, and "shining, confident” for her rendering of Krenek’s Kantate.
Eileen has premiered works by: William Anderson, Jack Beeson, Hayes Biggs, Brian Coughlin,
Stephen Dydo, Nancy Gunn, Peter Frost, Dale Jergenson, Charles Norman Mason, Gregg Smith,
Martha Sullivan, Dick Thompson, William Vollinger, and others, and performed works of Berg,
Carter, Copland, Kernis, Krenek, Rorem, Schoenberg, William Schuman, Stravinsky, Virgil
Thompson, & Webern, as well as many others.
Her recordings include indie-award winner "best classical vocal": Lemons Descending with Matt
Haimovitz cello (Oxingale Records), Krenek's Kantate for Soprano and Chorus (Gregg Smith,
conductor), Toby Twining's Chrysalid Requiem (Cantaloupe Records), all the Voices of Ascension
CD's (Delos), Kiitos a Vocal Quartet’s All out of darkess, the soundtrack of Oscar winner Dead
Man Walking, and solo performances on Raj Bongo, Vox and Helicon. For a decade, Eileen
toured as soloist with Mark Morris Dance Group. She is a member of Toby Twining Music,
Voices of Ascension, and a long time member of Gregg Smith Singers. She serves on the board
of, and contracts vocalists for Brooklyn Contemporary Chorus.
She has sung Queen of the Night with Syracuse Opera, American Classical Orchestra and Little
Orchestra Society of NY, Adina (Elixer of Love) with Common Wealth Opera, Naiad (Ariadne auf
Naxos) with Syracuse Opera, Galatea (Rameau’s Pygmalion), the staged Jonathan Miller St.
Matthew Passion at BAM, and all the Bard Summerscape operas, as well as guested with many
orchestras and chorus in oratorio works, concert pieces, and symphony pops.
Her less musical interests include comparative religion, English history & neolithic sites,
freemasonry, astronomy, yoga, environment & peace concerns, her parents Verl & Lil, and dogs.
Thomas Schmidt is a church musician, organist, pianist, chamber musician, conductor and
composer. Church has always saturated Tom’s life. His father was a pastor and, at an early age,
Tom became a church musician. He studied organ and church music with Philip Gehring at
Valparaiso University. He holds a Master of Music degree from the University of Wisconsin and a
Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Yale University, both in piano. For 22 years he was Professor
of Music at Concordia College, Bronxville, New York. There he taught piano, music theory and
music history.
Tom is director of music and cantor, a position he has held since 1990. His principle responsibility is the organ, choral and occasional music used in liturgy at Saint Peter’s Church. Under Tom’s capable leadership, music at Saint Peter’s Church emphasizes both the rich musical traditions of the church as well as new works by living composers. In 1993 he founded the Bach Festival and oversees Saint Peter’s Tuesday evening classical concert series. Every Good Friday Tom conducts choir and orchestra in one of Bach’s Passion settings.
Tom’s professional affiliations include the American Guild of Organists (AGO) and the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians (ALCM). He has served as Secretary/Treasurer for ALCM Region I, and as a planning committee member and presenter for AGO and ALCM conferences. He is one of twenty New York City organists featured on the recording Great Organs of New York (B&V label). For many years Tom was an active member of the Metropolitan New York Synod’s worship committee.
Tom is a founding member of the Arden Trio. Since 1979 it has toured throughout the United States and Europe, and has recorded on the Delos, Naxos, and Canal Grande labels. He is Assistant Conductor of The Gregg Smith Singers, and, since 2009 he has been the conductor of the Long Island Symphonic Choral Association in Suffolk County.Tom and his wife, Kathy, live in Harlem. He enjoys riding his bicycle to Saint Peter’s Church.
Evan Ziporyn (b. 1959, Chicago) makes music at the crossroads between genres and cultures, east and west. He studied at Eastman, Yale & UC Berkeley with Joseph Schwantner, Martin Bresnick, & Gerard Grisey. He first traveled to Bali in 1981, studying with Madé Lebah, Colin McPhee's 1930s musical informant. He returned on a Fulbright in 1987.
Earlier that year, he performed a clarinet solo at the First Bang on a Can Marathon in New York. His involvement with BOAC continued for 25 years: in 1992 he co-founded the Bang on a Can All-stars (Musical America's 2005 Ensemble of the Year), with whom he toured the globe and premiered over 100 commissioned works, collaborating with Nik Bartsch, Iva Bittova, Don Byron, Ornette Coleman, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Thurston Moore, Terry Riley and Tan Dun. He co-produced their seminal 1996 recording of Brian Eno's Music for Airports, as well as their most recent CD, Big Beautiful Dark & Scary (2012). Ziporyn joined the MIT faculty in 1990, founding Gamelan Galak Tika there in 1993, and beginning a series of groundbreaking compositions for gamelan & western instruments.
These include three evening-length works, 2001's ShadowBang, 2004's Oedipus Rex (Robert Woodruff, director), and 2009's A House in Bali, an opera which joins western singers with Balinese traditional performers, and the All-stars with a full gamelan. It received its world premiere in Bali that summer and its New York premiere at BAM Next Wave in October 2010.
As a clarinettist, Ziporyn recorded the definitive version of Steve Reich's multi-clarinet NY Counterpoint in 1996, sharing in that ensemble's Grammy in 1998. In 2001 his solo clarinet CD, This is Not A Clarinet, made Top Ten lists across the country. His compositions have been commissioned by Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road, Kronos Quartet, American Composers Orchestra, Maya Beiser, So Percussion, Wu Man, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, with whom he recorded his most recent CD, Big Grenadilla/Mumbai (2012). His honors include awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (2011), The Herb Alpert Foundation (2011), USA Artists Walker Fellowship (2007), MIT's Kepes Prize (2006), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Goddard Lieberson Fellowship (2004), as well as commissions from Meet the Composer/ Commissioning Music USA and the Rockefeller MAP Fund. Recordings of his works have been been released on Cantaloupe, Sony Classical, New Albion, New World, Koch, Naxos, Innova, and CRI.He is Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music at MIT. He also serves as Head of Music and Theater Arts, and this year was appointed Inaugural Director of MIT's new Center for Art Science and Technology. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts with Christine Southworth, and has two children, Leonardo (19) and Ava (12).
Praised for his “dazzling performance” by the New York Times, violinist Ari Streisfeld has quickly established himself on the contemporary classical music scene. As a founding member of the internationally acclaimed JACK Quartet, Mr. Streisfeld has worked closely with composers Helmut Lachenmann, György Kurtág, Matthias Pintscher, Georg Friedrich Haas, James Dillon, Toshio Hosokawa, Wolfgang Rihm, Elliott Sharp, Beat Furrer, Caleb Burhans, and Aaron Cassidy. Highlights of the 2012- 2013 JACK season include performances at Wigmore Hall (London), La Salle Pleyel (Paris), Suntory Hall (Tokyo), the Miller Theatre (New York), and the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland).
As a composer, Mr. Streisfeld was a recipient of the 2000 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Awards. The Los Angeles Times said his arrangements of music by Machaut and Gesualdo were “imaginatively arranged for string quartet”. As a soloist, he has performed with the Kennett Symphony Orchestra and the Northwestern Philharmonia. As winner of the 2008 Boston University Concerto Competition, Mr. Streisfeld performed the Berg Violin Concerto with the Boston University Symphony Orchestra.
Mr. Streisfeld holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music and Northwestern University and is currently pursuing his DMA at Boston University. His teachers have included Zvi Zeitlin, Almita Vamos and Peter Zazofsky. Mr. Streisfeld has recorded for Mode, Albany, Carrier, Innova, Canteloupe, and New World Records.
Librettist/lyricist Kim Rich is a graduate of the Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey and a member of ASCAP.
One of her earliest collaborative experiences was with the late composer Elie Siegmeister, which resulted in the setting of a number of her poems to his music. Some of these songs were premiered during the Elie Siegmeister Centennial memorial year of 2009.
She has had a long-time collaboration with composer/conductor Gregg Smith, founder of the Gregg Smith Singers. They began collaboration by creating three commissioned children’s operas: Rip Van Winkle, premiered in Manhattan in 1990, and featured at the 1990 Adirondack Music Festival; The Story-Teller (premiered under the direction of Linda Ferreira in Cookeville, Tennessee in 1996); and The Dream-Eater (an original libretto commissioned by the Central Park East School, in conjunction with the Annenberg Foundation and the Center for Arts Education). It was premiered in Manhattan in 2001. Gregg has also set a number of Kim’s poems as a suite, entitled Fallen Angels, for voice, piano, and clarinet, as well as Pretty Good Company, a cabaret song cycle based on the epigrams of Gomer Rees.
Kim also collaborates with Finnish jazz composer Heikki Sarmanto. Works include: Manon in Manhattan, a jazz opera commissioned by the Finnish National Opera (which has had staged readings in Finland and Estonia in 2007), The Birth of the World (a choral work about creation), Foxfire Fable (a children’s musical) and The Winter War Requiem, premiered by the Händel Choir of Tampere Finland in 2009.
Song cycles include North Country Suite, Carnival of Shadows (a masque based on the Orpheus legend), I Crossed the Bridge of Dreams, and Journey of the Heart. Their latest song cycle is Saci Pererê, based on Brazilian folk and animal characters and themes. Kim Rich has been working for over a decade with New Jersey-based composer Dick Thompson. They specialize in jazz-influenced art songs and choral pieces for amateur and school choirs. The jazz choral work Fifty-Second Street Suite was premiered by the Gregg Smith Singers in Saranac Lake and Manhattan. Commissioned choral works include Tune My Soul, Parents, What Does America Look Like?, A Keeper of the Light, and Lady Liberty (Mother of Exiles), premiered in Manhattan by the Children's Aid Society Chorus, under the direction of conductor Peter Frost.
With California-based composer Dale Jergenson, Kim Rich has created a number of choral pieces which include The Age of Ash (a 16-voice a cappella piece), Song of the Red Dove (which received Honors from the “Waging Peace Through Song” contest), A Spell of Discord (a dramatic treatment for choir, solo voices, and instruments), and The Gods (a song cycle for mezzo and piano, violin and clarinet trio). Two choral pieces, Sing Me a Song of Seventy and The Gates, were premiered by the Gregg Smith Singers in 2005.
A collaboration with composer David Bennett Thomas has resulted in two works: Noon Ghost— a collection of five poems (recorded on Capstone records by Eileen Clark in May 2006) and A Calendar of Haiku (A Song of Seasons) (premiered by the Gregg Smith Singers in Manhattan on January 13, 2007).
She wrote lyrics to a musical based on Alexandre Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo, working with playwright Gayle Stahlhuth and the late composer Lee Erwin. The musical has had staged readings in Manhattan at the Episcopalian Actors Guild, the Players Club and the Triangle Theatre Company in Manhattan in 1993 and 1994, respectively. She created libretto, lyrics and music for two one-act musicals – Daniel, which was premiered in Manhattan in 1991, and Prodigal Child, premiered in Manhattan in 2009. She has also written two full-length musicals (Hallelujah Trail and Jehovah Contract), which have had staged readings.
As music director, arranger and accompanist, Kim Rich helped produce the off-off-off-Broadway premiere of Albanian Holiday, a musical comedy by composer/playwright Carl Sievert, which has since been produced in regional theater. She also collaborated with him on two one-act cabaret musicals, Conference Calls and Full Frontal Radio, both of which were performed at The Duplex cabaret theater in Manhattan.
Kim Rich contributes music, lyrics, poetry and sketches to various cabaret acts, singers, and performance artists, and is a cabaret performer in her own right.