In Review: New York Festival of Song
Too many noteworthy songs by U.S. composers are neglected after their premiere; here, Brin Solomon reflects on a concert by New York Festival of Song devoted to encore performances for a decade’s worth of music.
Brin Solomon writes words and music in several genres and is doing their best to queer all of them. Solomon majored in composition at Yale University before earning their MFA in Musical Theatre Writing at NYU/Tisch. Their full-length musical Window Full of Moths has been hailed for its "extraordinary songs" that "add magic to otherwise ordinary lives", and their latest one-act, Have You Tried Not Being A Monster, has been described as "agitprop for Julia Serrano." Their writing has appeared in VAN, New Classic LA, and National Sawdust Log, and they recently won runner-up at the 2018 Rubin Institute for Music Criticism.
Too many noteworthy songs by U.S. composers are neglected after their premiere; here, Brin Solomon reflects on a concert by New York Festival of Song devoted to encore performances for a decade’s worth of music.
Looking back at everything PROTOTYPE had to offer in a more compact but still wide-ranging 2020 festival, Brin Solomon discusses what worked, what struggled, and what might have been avoided.
Improvising bassist, composer, and bandleader Brandon Lopez opened a Roulette residency with a quartet that demanded to be seen and heard live, Brin Solomon reports.
Performing at (Le) Poisson Rouge, the violinist Midori and the pianist Ieva Jokubaviciute presented that rare treat: a program of 20th- and 21st-century works played with impeccable polish, Brin Solomon relates.
Wave Hill provided a fitting location for Britten’s gothic-horror chamber opera ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ but a production by On Site Opera lacked coherent direction, Brin Solomon reports.
Memory, imagination, virtuosity, and diplomacy all played roles in a performance of recent works by George Lewis at NYU Skirball Center, reviewed by Brin Solomon.
Brin Solomon reports on a workshop performance of ‘Michigan Trees,’ a new fairy-tale opera by Grey Grant, in which a protagonist’s desire to transform is endangered by conflicting personas.
Julia Wolfe’s oratorio ‘Fire in my mouth’ registers with intensity in a New York Philharmonic performance issued on Decca Gold, Brin Solomon asserts, even without its visual and spatial elements.
Brin Solomon reviews ‘Soft Butter,’ the original cast recording of a musical-theater work by é boylan that uses macabre and dreamlike imagery to poetically evoke personal truths about trans life.
SWELL, a new experimental song cycle by multiple composers and lyricists presented at HERE on July 14, zooms in on deeply personal stories of immigrants and their descendants, Brin Solomon reports.