Five Boroughs Music Festival Announces Winter/Spring 2023 Season

Committed to presenting world-class, affordable chamber music concerts in all corners of New York City, Five Boroughs Music Festival (5BMF) announces its 2023 winter/spring season, featuring three sets of programming. Five Boroughs Music Festival partners with esteemed choral organization Voices of Ascension to present three concerts as part of the Voices of the New 2023 Winter Festival on Tuesday, January 31, 2023 at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, February 14, 2023 at 7:30 p.m., and Tuesday, February 28, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. at Roulette Intermedium.

5BMF and GEMAS (Gotham Early Music Scene/Americas Society) then co-present Cuban early music ensemble Ars Longa de la Habana in a program highlighting the African presence in baroque music from the New World on Wednesday, March 15, 2023 at 7:00 p.m. at St. Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church. In June, 5BMF partners with ChamberQUEER - an ensemble and presenter highlighting LGBTQ+ voices in classical music - to expand their Pride Month programming throughout the boroughs with three concerts from June 9 to 12 at venues to be announced in Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Manhattan.

Curated by inaugural Voices of the New artist and 5BMF alumna artist Hai-Ting Chinn, each Voices of the New Winter Festival concert features the world premiere performance of a newly commissioned work by a composer who was selected through an open call for proposals issued in late 2021. The new pieces are paired with a selection of old and new works chosen by the members of the ensemble and performed on an intimate scale, offering the audience a chance to connect directly with the ensemble.

On Tuesday, January 31, 2023 at 7:30 p.m., Songs to the Unknown explores singing as a way of connecting ourselves to something larger than our individual selves and features the world premiere of Hannah Selin's and we fly away. Dedicated to elderly relatives who have passed away in recent years, this piece will set portions of Psalm 90 in various languages, and will explore the impact of past generations on the present. The remainder of the program will explore the themes of death, afterlife, and past generations, and will involve members from diverse religious and non-religious spiritual traditions and the chants and chant-derived music from those traditions.

Love, Loneliness and Lamentation, Tuesday, February 14 at 7:30 p.m. features the world premiere of Max Vinetz's cheap placeholders for real things for eight voices and string quartet and also includes music from the sweet to the cynical and everything in between.

The third concert of the Festival on Tuesday, February 28 at 7:30 p.m., Circle in Motion, celebrates the extraordinary power of communal music making to create connections. The program includes the world premiere of Songs in Motion by Raquel Acevedo Klein, which explores the feeling of reconnecting with each other after a period of pandemic isolation, and the re-evoking of the feeling of singing together and for an audience. The lyrics will draw on personal narratives that Raquel will collect from members of the ensemble, including neighborhoods they have been part of and random encounters that bring people together in the interconnected landscape of a city, starting with Raquel's own Puerto Rican and Colombian community and branching out to a variety of communities across the city.

The three concerts will be performed by the Voices of Ascension Singers and Players, a chamber ensemble drawn from a mix of longtime members of Voices of Ascension, as well as new faces. The Voices of the New Festival was envisioned as a way to spotlight the talents of its individual members and serves as a place for the singers to exercise artistic autonomy and leadership as they collaboratively program and rehearse these concerts, while providing a way for Voices of Ascension to meet new artists, particularly those who come from historically underrepresented backgrounds. Taken together, these three concerts will provide both culturally specific and collective reflections on how a musical community creates art out of the most challenging and comforting experiences that occur for human beings, and how to explore how music and singing together reflect and create community.

In March, Cuban early music ensemble Ars Longa de la Habana makes its 5BMF debut in a program drawing from the ensemble's 2013 album Gulumbá Gulumbé. Resonancias de África en el Nuevo Mundo. In a concert co-presented by 5BMF and GEMAS, a collaboration between Gotham Early Music Scene (GEMS) and the Americas Society, Ars Longa performs music based on research by Guatemalan musicologist Omar Morales Abril, including several villancicos negros, musical pieces intended primarily for Christmas, as well as poetry, recited by members of the ensemble.

In an effort to expand their 2023 Pride Month programming throughout the boroughs, 5BMF partners with ChamberQUEER for concerts comprising their fifth annual summer series. ChamberQUEER is a Brooklyn-based arts and culture organization that highlights LGBTQ+ voices in contemporary and historical music and reimagines the classical concert milieu as a radically inclusive community. Together with 5BMF, both organizations will co-present an immersive and participatory experience with performances from June 9 to 12 in venues to be announced throughout Staten Island, Brooklyn and Manhattan, encompassing reflections of queer artistic partnerships throughout history and featuring an ensemble of today's most exciting composer-performers. In addition to offering beautiful and emotionally charged programs, this offering will explore how the networks and connections of our daily and performance life contribute to inform and transform the creative process. This event marks ChamberQUEER's first production in Staten Island.