Five Boroughs Music Festival Announces Fall 2022 Season

Five Boroughs Music Festival (5BMF) - champions of chamber music in all corners of NYC - has announced its Fall 2022 season, which features the Queens, Bronx, and Manhattan premieres of the Five Borough Songbook, Volume III, and Love Affects by Castle of our Skins featuring Angel C. Dye.

5BMF collaborates with On Site Opera to present the Queens, Bronx, and Manhattan premieres of the Five Borough Songbook, Volume III on Friday, October 21, 2022 at 7:00pm at Flushing Town Hall; Saturday, October 22, 2022 at 7:00pm at the Bronx Music Heritage Center; and Sunday, October 23, 2022 at 3:00pm at Hebrew Union College. These anticipated performances will complete the Songbook's citywide tour which began in April 2022 with borough premieres in Brooklyn and Staten Island.

The Five Borough Songbook, Volume III, a new cycle of 15 songs, duets, and ensemble works by 15 composers, was commissioned in honor of 5BMF's 15th anniversary and On Site Opera's 10th Anniversary seasons. It also marks the third installment of 5BMF's critically acclaimed flagship Five Borough Songbook project. The Songbook is performed by members of Kaleidoscope Vocal Ensemble - sopranos Nicole Joseph and Gitanjali Mathur, mezzo-soprano Cecilia Duarte, tenor Haitham Haidar, and baritone Jonathan Woody - in addition to pianist Erika Switzer, violinist Pala Garcia, and cellist John Popham.

The Songbook is divided into five sections, each inspired by one of New York City's boroughs. Its songs were composed by Arianne Abela, Raquel Acevedo Klein, Kinan Azmeh, Colin Britt, Majel Connery, Laura Jobin-Acosta, Will Healy, Brian Lawlor, Jessica Meyer, Angélica Negrón, Nkeiru Okoye, Juri Seo, Aaron Siegel, Darian Donovan Thomas, and Jonathan Woody. Song texts were drawn from a variety of sources: written by the composers themselves; drawn from existing poetry by Nick Main, Amy Lowell, Joseph Tusiani, and Walt Whitman; and with new texts, in Arabic by Firas Suleiman, in Spanish and English by Noel Quiñones, and in English by Tom Lee and Valerie Seeley.

On Friday, November 18, 2022 at 7:00pm, 5BMF co-presents Boston-based ensemble Castle of our Skins - a Black arts institution dedicated to fostering cultural curiosity and celebrating Black artistry through music in classrooms, concert halls, and beyond - at the Langston Hughes Auditorium at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The program, entitled Love Affects, pairs chamber music with text to explore how love influences our sense of self, humanity, heritage, and future, and is a revival of their inaugural concert program, performed in celebration of their 10th anniversary this season.

This concert is co-curated with and features Castle of our Skins' 3rd Annual Shirley Graham du Bois Creative in Residence, Angel C. Dye. Dye is a poet, scholar of African American Literature, and the author of BREATHE (Central Square Press). She hails from Dallas-Ft. Worth, TX/Milwaukee, WI, is a graduate of Howard University, holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Kentucky, and is currently a PhD in English student at Rutgers University.