García Lorca: Muse and Magician
Where: Merkin Concert Hall
129 W. 67th St.
212-501-3330 Price: $20-$62
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Steven Blier, whose knowledge and passion for Spanish music is well known, has assembled a program that paints a portrait of the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca through songs by an international roster of composers including Poulenc, Montsalvatge, Revueltas, Billy Strayhorn, Leonard Cohen, William Bolcom, Carlos Surinach, and Manuel de Falla and the writer himself (who studied music in his youth).
The brilliant American soprano Corinne Winters and Mexican-American baritone Efraín Solís are the featured soloists. Solís last appeared with NYFOS in Compositora: Songs by Latin American Women in 2016. This program included several intense settings of Lorca, all singled out as “revelations” by The New York Times, “sung with keening clarity” by Solís.
Blier has written that Corinne Winters “has to have one of the most opulent voices on the current scene.” Together they share an obsession with the diverse music of Spain, and in addition to concertizing, recorded an acclaimed album of often-neglected Catalan, Basque, Sephardic, and Castilian repertoire, entitled Canción amorosa: Songs of Spain.
“One of Blier’s greatest enthusiasms within the traditional art-song genre has been the Spanish and Hispanic repertory, which most singers and accompanists ignore; for years he has been digging up treasures, always lovingly performed,” wrote Russell Platt in The New Yorker.