Baruch Performing Arts Center Announces 2018/2019 Season

Baruch Performing Arts Center announces their 2018/2019 season, featuring premieres by composers Huang Ruo, Gregory Spears, and the late Matt Marks, and choreographer Dusan Týnek. The season includes the 27th year of the Milt Hinton Jazz Perspectives series, a 5th Anniversary celebration of the CUNY Dance Initiative, and work in progress by veteran writer-performer Penny Arcade. For more information and tickets, visit http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/bpac/. All performances take place at 55 Lexington Ave. (enter 25th Street between Lexington & 3rd Aves.)

"BPAC is your arts center and we hope that you'll come celebrate with us," said Ted Altschuler, director of Baruch Performing Arts Center. "Our 2018-19 season is all about celebrating diverse cultures and perspectives with compelling programs that are relevant to the issues of the day. Get close by experiencing performances in intimately scaled venues. Go deep by engaging with artists as they create work. Come often because we keep our prices affordable."

BPAC 2018-19 Season

Harman Writers Series - Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

October 16, 2018 5:30pm

A reading from the latest play by 2016 MacArthur Fellow Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and a discussion with author and director of Harman Writers Series Bridgett Davis.

Tickets $16

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins won the 2014 Obie Award for Best New American Play, for his plays Appropriate and An Octoroon. His plays Gloria and Everybody were finalists for the 2016 and 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Dramarespectively.

Guy Livingston Dada at the Movies

October 17, 2018 at 7:30pm

Tickets $36

"An exceptionally agile and charismatic performer" - Los Angeles Times

"A pianist with a flair for modernism"- The New York Times

On July 8, 1923, the Parisian Dadaists organized their most famous event ever. It included a play by Tristan Tzara, films by Man Ray and Hans Richter, live music by George Antheil, Erik Satie, and Darius Milhaud. During the show, a riot broke out and the poet Paul Eluard was thrown off the stage. The gendarmes were summoned, and the soirée was memorialized as one of the great art scandals of all time. Pianist Guy Livingston brings us back to that evening, re-creating the music together with the films in a new interdisciplinary performance commissioned by the Holland Festival.

Words on the Street

Performances on October 26, 27, 29, 30, November 1, 2, 3, 2018 at 7:30pm, and November 4 at 3pm

Tickets $36

Words on the Street is a mystery, and the crime involves all humanity. An infant is abducted and the seven deadly sins play out their power struggle while pandemonium reigns in a dystopian world teaming with hearsay and falsehood and plagued by threat and insecurity. This series of poems written by Anna Rabinowitz has been transformed into a hybrid performance event, collaboratively conceived and developed by the writer, director Kristin Marting, video designer Lianne Arnold, and the late composer Matt Marks (1980-2018) with additional compositions by Lainie Fefferman, John Glover, Mary Kouyoumdjian, David T. Little, Kamala Sankaram, Caroline Shaw, and Randall Woolf and music direction by Mila Henry. A diverse ensemble of performers includes acclaimed soprano Lauren Flanigan, Sumayya Ali, Paul An, Caitlin Cisco, John Kelly, Paul Pinto, and Adrian Rosas.

Silberman Recital Series

Tessa Lark (violin) & Andrew Armstrong (piano)

October 31, 2018 at 6:30pm

Tickets are FREE to the public thanks to the Silberman Family.

"Lark is an accomplished and expressive artist worthy of all the fuss" - Albany Times Union

Recipient of a 2018 Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship and winner of both an Avery Fisher Career Grant and the Naumburg Violin competition, violinist Tessa Lark is beloved of audiences and lauded by critics for her technical agility, elegance, and astounding range. Ms. Lark has performed as a featured soloist with numerous U.S. orchestras since debuting with the Cincinnati Symphony at age sixteen and appeared last year at Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall on the Distinctive Debuts series. She will be joined by pianist Andrew Armstrong, whose busy career includes performances this year at the Caramoor Festival and Wigmore Hall. Their program includes works of Beethoven, Stravinsky and Lark's original composition Appalachian Fantasy, a work inspired by her Kentucky roots, combining classical and bluegrass.

Alexander String Quartet

November 14, 2018 at 7:30pm

Tickets $36

"Dream-come-true performances." - Boston Globe

The Fall concert includes Mozart: String Quartet No. 8 in F major, K. 168 (1773); Ravel: String Quartet (1902-3); Schubert: String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810 "Death and the Maiden" (1824).

Joshua Roman (Cello) & Gilles Vonsattel (piano)

Nov 27, 2019 at 7:30 pm

Tickets $36

Joshua Roman has earned an international reputation as "A cellist of extraordinary technical and musical gifts." San Francisco Chronicle. His commitment to communicating the essence of music in visionary ways extends to roles, as an accomplished composer, curator, and he was named a TED Senior Fellow in 2015. Roman will be joined by Gilles Vonsattel, a recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and winner of the Naumburg and Geneva competitions. In recent years, Vonsattel has made his Boston Symphony, Tanglewood, and San Francisco Symphony debuts. In this program, they will perform Janacek, Beethoven, Pärt, Brahms, and more.

The Faghag and Her Friends in The Summer of Love

December 6 - 8, 2018 at 7:30 pm

Tickets $31

The latest offering from veteran playwright/performer Penny Arcade, at the peak of her powers, features Arcade's spot-on impersonations and intoxicating improvisational style, "stiletto wit...blistering" - The New York Times. Together with longtime collaborator Steve Zehentner, they move into new territory, embedding a narrative play into a filmic abstract that travels from 1967 Provincetown to the cafes and night clubs of New York City's celebrated demimonde, where tragedy and transformation walked hand in hand and created a breeding ground for revolutionary thinking and artistic innovation. "When I was 15, 16... my goal every night was to sit at the table with the old queens, a difficult invitation to get for a teenage girl...The old queens knew everything I wanted to know ...They did not tolerate banality nor mediocrity and theirs was a fierce and unapologetic intelligence. Just sitting at that table in a dark bar or fluorescent coffee shop, lifted your IQ twenty points!"

A collaboration with PROTOTYPE music-theater Festival, co-presented with Beth Morrison Projects and HERE Arts Center.

Performances January 5 - 12, 2019

The 2017-18 collaboration - the world premiere of The Echo Drift was called: "One of the most exciting events of the 2018 festival... a truly moving, dynamic piece of music theater." - Opera News

Dusan Týnek - Jardin Qui Rit

March 7-9, 2019 at 7:30pm

Tickets $31

"Týnek is a talent who ... creates inventive, luscious movement [with] an instinct for theatrical effect" - The New York Times

"Gardens can be places of conflicting manifestations - beauty and horror, birth and death, hope and disappointment - one never knows what lurks behind the next hedge." Internationally renowned choreographer Dusan Týnek (Big, musical, full-bodied dancing... beauty abounded" - Deborah Jowitt, ArtsJournal) creates an evening-length work for 7 dancers and video projection, with an original score. A surrealistic homage to the middle panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights by H. Bosch.

NeuroCulture - This is your brain on baseball

A Brain Awareness Week program

March 12, 2019

Tickets $21

Journalist Zach Schonbrun, author of The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience Is Redefining Athletic Genius, explores what drives human movement with Jason Sherwin, cofounder and CEO of deCervo, a neuro-tech startup based in New York City that measures and improves cognitive performance for athletes.

Brian Mulligan (baritone) & Timothy Long (piano)

March 13, 2019 at 7:30

Tickets $36

Praised for his "velvety, evenly and effortlessly produced baritone and nuance-rich phrasing" - Opera News, Brian Mulligan frequently appears with the world's leading orchestras and opera companies including the Metropolitan, San Francisco, and Houston Grand Operas. He is joined by pianist Timothy Long, who has performed with the New York City, Boston Lyric, and Wolf Trap Operas, in the New York premiere of the song cycle Walden based on texts by Henry David Thoreau. The latest vocal composition of Gregory Spears whose opera Fellow Travelers was a sensation at the 2017 Prototype Festival ("characterized by the tonal freshness and propulsive momentum... his vocal writing is charmingly idiosyncratic" -

The New York Times). The cycle is paired with Dominick Argento's From the Diary of Virginia Woolf.

CUNY Dance Initiative: 5th Anniversary Bash

March 20 - 24, 2019

Tickets: TBD

Celebrate the 5th anniversary of the CUNY Dance Initiative, a residency program that opens the doors of CUNY campuses to NYC choreographers and dance companies across the five boroughs, with performances and workshops by the program's extraordinary current and former artists.

Silberman Recital Series

Canadian Guitar Quartet - Romantic Impressions

March 26, 2019 at 7:30 pm

Tickets are FREE to the public thanks to the Silberman Family.

"...fantastic, spirited playing and sheer inventiveness..." - Classical Guitar

This ensemble's dynamic mix of original and classical repertoire has earned them a reputation as one of the finest guitar ensembles in the world. Music by Beethoven, Brahms, Ravel, and others

Milt Hinton Jazz Perspectives Series

Aaron Diehl Trio - Virtuoso at Play

Mar 28, 2019 at 8pm at Engelman Hall, 55 Lexington Ave, NYC.

Tickets $36

Aaron Diehl, the classically trained pianist and composer, has made an indelible mark on the jazz world, with a rare affinity for early jazz, mid-20th century "third-stream" music, and modern classical works. "...melodic precision, harmonic erudition, and elegant restraint." - The New York Times.

Refuge - a collaboration of Blessed Unrest Theater & Teatri ODA

April 22 - May 12, 2019

Tickets $36

"Blessed Unrest...will change how you see others and, ultimately, how you see yourself." - New York Theatre Review

2 theater Companies - one from NY and one from Kosovo - create a bilingual, devised physical-theatre work about the harboring of Jewish refugees by Albanians during World War II.

Bound - New York Premiere

Huang Ruo (composer); Bao-Long Chu (librettist); Ashley Tata (director)

Co-presented with Fresh Squeezed Opera

April 13 - 19, 2019

Tickets $36

A chamber opera inspired by a news headline, "Diane Tran, Honor Student at Texas High School, Jailed for Missing School," Bound explores the experience of a Vietnamese immigrant family torn between the notion of the American dream and preserving their cultural heritage. New York premiere by "one of the world's leading young composers" - The New Yorker.

Israeli Chamber Project

April 16, 2019 at 7:30pm

Tickets $36

"A band of world-class soloists...who think, breathe and play as one." - Time Out NY

Israeli Chamber Project members share a passion for music-making and deep connection with the musical culture of Israel. Acclaimed in performances around the world, they devise programs combining beloved masterworks with lesser-known gems and music by Israeli composers. Returning to BPAC for a 3rd year, their program includes Mozart, Brahms, Bartok, and Israeli composer Yinam Leef.

Poland and the Jews

May 2, 2019

Presented with the Sandra Kahn Wasserman Jewish Studies Center

In 2018, Polish President Andrzej Duda signed into law legislation that makes it a crime - punishable by fines or prison - to attribute responsibility for or complicity during the Holocaust to the Polish nation or state. This law adds another layer of complexity to Polish-Jewish history - a history stretching back over 1000 years. Poland and the Jews is a day-long event featuring a series of panels and cultural events that consider the intertwined and fractured relations between the two communities.

Alexander String Quartet

May 2, 2019

Tickets $36

Performance follows the Jewish Studies Center conference.

BPAC's string-quartet-in-residence returns with a program of Mozart: String Quartet No. 16 in E flat major, K. 428 (1783); Krzysztof Penderecki: String Quartet No. 3 "Leaves of an Unwritten Diary" (2008); Dvo?ák: String Quartet No. 12 in F major, Op. 96 "American" (1893)

Baruch Performing Arts Center is an acclaimed performing arts presence. Located in the heart of Manhattan just east of Chelsea and the famed flatiron building, BPAC presents renowned classical music, opera, jazz, theater, dance, discussion, film, and innovative cross-genre programming. BPAC has presented over 1,000 cultural programs in its 5 spaces since 2003. Its curated season of 40 programs annually emphasizes new work experienced in intimate settings, the diversity of American culture as exemplified by Baruch students (who come from 130 different countries), and work that lives at the confluence of art and social justice.

Past presentations have included theatre companies such as the National Asian American Theatre Company, Folksbiene, and MCC. The world premiere of the opera The Echo Drift as part of the Prototype festival. Dance companies such as Heidi Latsky Dance, José Limón, and Urban Bush Women. BPAC is the New York home of the Alexander String Quartet and presents a rich chamber music season including ensembles such as the Israeli Chamber Project and pianists Sara Davis Buechner and 2018 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist, Michael Brown. BPAC offers a jazz series named for bassist Milt Hinton, which has featured artists such as Grammy-Award winner Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks. Discussion program have included writers Teju Cole, Colum McCann and Amitav Ghosh, actress Linda Lavin, and thought leaders such as Gloria Steinem and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Visit www.baruch.cuny.edu/bpac for complete and up-to-date information on the 2018-19 season.