“If Michael Barrett and I were to create our own musical Mount Rushmore, we would have to start with sixty-foot sculptures of Leonard Bernstein and William Bolcom,” writes Steven Blier in his program note to A Bernstein/Bolcom Celebration, a New York Festival of Song program that takes place this week on Tuesday and Thursday at Merkin Concert Hall.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know that Bernstein—whose 90th birthday would have been this October—is being feted in performances all across New York this fall. On Wednesday, Carnegie Hall welcomes the San Francisco Symphony in a gala  all-Bernstein concert, to be telecast on PBS’s Great Performances on October 29. Meanwhile, NYFOS—as New York Festival Song is commonly known—is having a double birthday celebration by devoting a program to Bernstein and composer William Bolcom, who turned 70 in May. Though Blier contrasts Bernstein’s “extravagant, sweaty theatrics” with Bolcom’s “essence of cool,” both have been enormously important to Blier’s idea of what a song program should be.

Blier, NYFOS’s artistic director, has been creating inventive programs for more than 20 years now, together with associate artistic director Michael Barrett. The first program, on October 10, 1988 at the Greenwich House Music School, was entitled “Lyrics by Shakespeare” and featured soprano Brenda Harris, bass-baritone Braden Harris, narrator Blythe Danner, with Blier on piano; one of the rarities that night was Kabalevsky’s Shakespeare Sonnets sung in Russian. (Bernstein’s and Bolcom’s music appeared on the second-ever program, on October 23, 1988, along with music of Charles Ives, Samuel Barber, Virgil Thomson, and John Musto.)

I chatted with Blier this weekend about Bernstein and Bolcom—and NYFOS, a labor of love he terms his “Magnificent Obsession.”

SundayArts: The phrase that often comes up when describing New York Festival of Song is from a New Yorker review saying it “reinvented the song recital.” Twenty years ago, what was wrong with the song recital? Did it need reinventing? read more