Brooklyn Art Song Society Features Scott Wheeler in IN CONTEXT Series Tonight

BASS continues its innovative new music series In Context at the Tenri Cultural Center tonight, April 2nd, 2016.

This year's featured composer is Scott Wheeler, hailed by Fanfare as "one of the freshest American voices." The program features Mr. Wheeler's work alongside those by colleagues and mentors (Virgil Thomson and Judith Weir) and favorite classics (Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann). The program will include the world premiere of Ben Gunn. Soprano Elisabeth Marhsall, mezzo soprano Kate Maroney, tenor Brandon Snook, and baritone Steven Eddy join pianists Michael Brofman, Jocelyn Dueck, and Miori Sugiyama.

As one of the great composers of song working today, Wheeler transforms poetry into music that is universal, uplifting, and profoundly beautiful. Ben Gunn, a song cycle set to poems by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, premiered last month by the Buffalo Chamber Players and the Florestan Recital Project in Buffalo, New York. Heavily influenced by his mentor Virgil Thomson, Wheeler's natural and lucid text-setting has been described as "gorgeously elegiac...lilting and tender" (Boston Phoenix).

In Context is Brooklyn Art Song Society's innovative new music series that presents the works of living composers alongside works from the standard repertoire. These programs are co-curated by the composers themselves in order to highlight musical relationships between past and present. Previous In Context composers include Tom Cipullo, Yehudi Wyner, Libby Larsen, Lowell Liebermann and Daron Hagen. The 2015- 2016 featured composer is Scott Wheeler.

The Brooklyn Art Song Society (BASS) will enter its sixth season of first-rate music making in the Fall of 2015, having earned a reputation as one of the preeminent organizations dedicated to the vast repertoire of poetry set to music. The New York Times called BASS "a company well worth watching" and Voce di Meche hailed, "as long as BASS is around we do not need to worry about the future of art song in the USA." BASS's innovative programming is epic in scope yet presented in intimate settings. Past highlights have included performances of the complete songs of Charles Ives and Henri Duparc, a festival of works from Franz Schubert's last year, a five-concert survey of the songs of Les Six, and an ongoing project to present the complete lieder of Hugo Wolf. Committed to keeping art song relevant in our time BASS has collaborated closely with important living composers such as Tom Cipullo, Herschel Garfein, Daron Hagen, Libby Larsen, Lowell Liebermann, James Matheson, Scott Wheeler and Yehudi Wyner, and has commissioned works from up-an-coming composers Michael Djupstrom, Marie Incontrera and Michael Rose.

In May 2015 BASS released its first album, New Voices, on Roven Records, which debuted at number one for new releases in Opera and Vocal on Amazon.com and in the top 10 on the Billboard Traditional Classical chart. The 2015-16 season includes Britannica, a six-concert celebration of British song from Dowland to Birtwistle, the conclusion of The Hugo Wolf Project, and the world-premiere of Andrew Staniland's Canadian Songbook (BASS/Casement Fund Song Series co-commission).

On top of monthly concerts in Brooklyn, BASS will travel to Kansas City, MO and Portland, ME. In the summer BASS is the Fonzaley Resident Ensemble at the Sembrich in Bolton Landing, New York and the ensemble in residence at the Lake George Music Festival. This season features over 30 of the finest young interpreters of art song. For more information visit www.brooklynartsongsociety.org

Scott Wheeler (b. 1952) is a Boston-based award-winning composer, conductor, and teacher with a multi- faceted career. Having proven his omnivorous range in instrumental solo, chamber, and orchestral music, it is his prominent profile as a composer of vocal and operatic music that defines his career and artistic personality. His operas have been commissioned and performed by the Metropolitan Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, Beth Morrison Projects, Washington National Opera and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has received awards and commissions from the Koussevitsky Foundation, the Fromm Foundation, American Academy in Berlin, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Bogliasco Fellowship, Tanglewood, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony, as well as the Stoeger Prize for excellence in chamber music from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Wheeler's latest recording Portrait (Bridge Records, 2016) features his piano portraits and tributes performed by Donald Berman. His current projects include a set of songs on texts of Paul Muldoon, a new opera with libretto by Cerise Jacobs for the Boston Lyric Opera, and a new ballet with choreographer Melissa Barak. Wheeler currently serves as composer-in-residence at Brooklyn Art Song Society's "IN Context Series," Affiliate at NYU's Center for Ballet and the Arts, and Professor at Boston's Emerson College. scottwheeler.org

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