Lotte Lenya News

Kim H. Kowalke, President of the Kurt Weill Foundation, has announced the finalists for the 2019 Lotte Lenya Competition. Thirteen performers will compete for top prizes of $20,000, $15,000, and $10,000.

Principal Guest Conductor David Charles Abell returns to his hometown of Philadelphia for Cole Porter's Broadway: Too Darn Hot, the explosive penultimate performance of The Philly POPS 40th Anniversary Season, April 12-14 at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. 

Twenty-eight performers selected to compete for a chance to win top prizes of $20,000, $15,000, and $10,000; total prizes to exceed $75,000; an all-star team of musical theater, opera, and Kurt Weill experts to adjudicate semifinals and finals.

The Kurt Weill Foundation is pleased to announce the appointment of Jesse Leong as the recipient of the Julius Rudel/Kurt Weill Conducting Fellowship. Established in 2015 to honor Rudel's extraordinary artistic achievements and dedication to the music of Kurt Weill, this award enables a young conductor in the early stages of a career to assist a master conductor in the preparation and performance of a work by Weill or Marc Blitzstein and expand his or her knowledge of their works. The fellowship carries a stipend of $10,000.

The winners of the American Vocal Arts 2019 International Collegiate Singing ChampionshipTM have been announced! The winners have been chosen from all over the world. The competition, sponsored by American Vocal Arts, emphasizes competitive collegiate singing that spans across borders. The goal of the competition is to award the best singers from around the world who are currently enrolled or have recently graduated from an undergraduate or graduate program in music. The winners were selected based on talent, potential, and overall presentation.

Twenty-eight performers selected to compete for a chance to win top prizes of $20,000, $15,000, and $10,000; total prizes to exceed $75,000; an all-star team of musical theater, opera, and Kurt Weill experts to adjudicate semifinals and finals.

Annette Warren, the "secret" singing voice of Ava Gardner and Lucille Ball in such films as the MGM classic "Show Boat," and a nightclub, TV and recording star whose career spans the past 70 years, will return to the Catalina Jazz Club in Hollywood on Tuesday, Feb. 19 with a the premiere performance of her new show, Professor Bob and the Old Broad, joined by accompanist Bob Remstein. 

The Kurt Weill Foundation for Music announced today that Ed Harsh has been appointed Director of Strategic Initiatives, effective immediately. Harsh recently concluded an eleven year tenure as President and CEO of New Music USA, including four years as President of Meet the Composer prior to the creation of New Music USA in 2011. He began his professional career in 1992 with an eight-year tenure as the inaugural Managing Editor of the Kurt Weill Edition.

LENYA STORY at Berlin's Renaissance Theater is a savagely misguided, heavy-handed slog through a poorly-written Wikipedia entry.  Neither a play, a musical (jukebox or otherwise), a concert, a musical revue or any other kind of theatrical entertainment, LENYA STORY takes two of the most fascinating exports from the Weimar Republic, Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, and makes a bloodless, passionless exercise in tedium out of their lives and careers.   

Join Cinnabar audience favorite Carolyn Bacon (The Fantasticks, My Way: A Tribute to Frank Sinatra) to explore the world of over-the-moon, mystifying, heartbreaking, and foolish love! A versatile and award-winning entertainer, Carolyn will sing Gershwin, Bernstein, Mozart, Jason Robert Brown, and more in this exciting, one-night-only cabaret. Pianist Brian Fitzsousa will accompany Carolyn and she will be joined by special guests, TBA.

The Atlanta Opera opens the 2018-19 mainstage season with a production of Leonard Bernstein's classic Broadway musical, West Side Story. Francesca Zambello, General & Artistic Director of The Glimmerglass Festival and Artistic Director of Washington National Opera, who created this new production with Houston Grand Opera, The Glimmerglass Festival, and Lyric Opera of Chicago, will direct.

Artist Series Concerts of Sarasota is pleased to present baritone John Brancy and pianist Peter Dugan performing "Armistice: The Journey Home," Saturday, November 3, 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, November 4, 3:00 p.m., at the Historic Asolo Theater, 5401 Bay Shore Road, Sarasota. The program, which tells the story of men and women who must find their way back home, literally and figuratively, from the ravages of war, features a compelling selection of music by Holst, Schubert, Rachmaninoff, Irving Berlin, Pete Seeger, and more. Reserved seat tickets are $25 to $45 and are available online at www.artistseriesconcerts.org or by calling 941-306-1202. $10 student tickets are available at the door with current student ID.

BroadwayWorld is saddened to report that Joseph Masteroff, the Tony-winning librettist of the international musical classics, Cabaret and She Loves Me, died on September 28th 2018 at the Actors Fund Home in Engelwood, New Jersey. He was 98 years old.

September 28 through to November 12, 2018, Baritone John Brancy will continue his collaboration with pianist Peter Dugan in an extensive 'A WWI Memorial in Song' tour in partnership with the WWI Centennial Commission. The pair have been redefining the art song recital since making their critically acclaimed debut of 'A Silent Night' at the Kennedy Center in 2014. Hailed by The Washington Post as 'so refreshingly, marvelously different,' the program pays homage to the centennial of World War I through the music of composers who lived through, fought in, and died in the Great War. Naperville's Wentz Hall (Cantigny Park, IL) is the first stop on the tour at a special concert event for the First Division Museum on September 28, 2018.

September 28 through to November 12, 2018, Baritone John Brancy will continue his collaboration with pianist Peter Dugan in an extensive 'A WWI Memorial in Song' tour in partnership with the WWI Centennial Commission. The pair have been redefining the art song recital since making their critically acclaimed debut of 'A Silent Night' at the Kennedy Center in 2014. Hailed by The Washington Post as 'so refreshingly, marvelously different,' the program pays homage to the centennial of World War I through the music of composers who lived through, fought in, and died in the Great War. Naperville's Wentz Hall (Cantigny Park, IL) is the first stop on the tour at a special concert event for the First Division Museum on September 28, 2018.

FEINSTEIN'S/54 BELOW - Broadway's Supper Club - will present the return of BENJAMIN EAKELEY and his jazz band in an encore performance of his acclaimed solo concert "BROADWAY SWINGER, VOLUME 2" on Tuesday, August 14 at 7:00 PM. "BROADWAY SWINGER, VOLUME 2," which chronicles the birth of swing music in the 1930s and the rise of the big bands that lifted American spirits out of the Great Depression, features timeless standards by Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern and other greats who established the 1930s as the Golden Age of American Songwriting.

The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey continues their season with the Main Stage production of 'Titus Andronicus' from July 18 to August 5.Broadwayworld.com had the pleasure of interviewing Benjamin Eakeley who plays Saturninus in the show.

Kent Tritle is Director of Cathedral Music and Organist at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the largest cathedral in the world; Music Director of the Oratorio Society of New York, the acclaimed 200-voice volunteer chorus; and Music Director of Musica Sacra, New York's longest continuously performing professional chorus. The 2018-19 season of “New York's choral conducting superstar” (Time Out New York) is marked by the expansion of the Oratorio Society's Carnegie Hall season from three to four concerts, which will include Kullervo, the rarely-performed symphonic poem by Sibelius, Szymanowski's Stabat Mater, and Verdi's Requiem.

The prestigious all-male singing group, The Down Town Glee Club, under the baton of Grant Mech, tips its collective hat to legendary Broadway producer Hal Prince in its annual Spring Concert, entitled Prince of the City, also featuring special guest, mezzo soprano, Amy Maude Helfer today, May 17, 2018 at 7:30 PM at The Baruch Performing Arts Center

This Sunday, May 13th, Damn The Light Productions presents a one night only tribute concert to The Who's Tommy at Duane Park. The evening will open with a "Decades" tribute highlighting some of radio's biggest hits from the 1960's through the 1990s. The 10:00pm set will star students from Marymount Manhattan College Theatre Arts Department "Pop/ Rock Performance Lab' created and taught by MaryAnne Piccolo and Mike Greko. Student performers include Sarah Bialkin, Julia Bustos-Gusse, Hobie Henson, Troy Lingelback, Nick Lynch, Jacki Manno, Eilis Quinn, Courtney Silber, Bryce Valle, Victor Vazquez, Maddy Waters, Olivia Whitehouse, Rikki Zielgelman.