Vocal Arts DC

Tenor Ben Bliss and pianist Christopher Allen launch our season with a program of irresistible breadth and warmth, drawing on the very finest of German and French song. The first half of the evening moves through the Romantic landscape with an assured and generous hand, offering Lieder by Schumann, Liszt, and Strauss — music that encompasses the intimacy of the salon, the grand sweep of Romantic longing, and the opulent, golden-voiced lyricism for which Strauss’s songs in particular have made tenors rejoice for well over a century. Bliss brings to this repertoire a voice of exceptional beauty — bright, focused, and capable of extraordinary refinement — along with a musician’s instinct for text and phrase that elevates every song he touches.

Ben Bliss & Christopher Allen

Live! At 10th & G

Tenor Matthew Polenzani and pianist Ken Noda bring their celebrated artistry to an intimate and searching evening of song at the French Embassy. Opening with Franz Schubert’s Schwanengesang, the composer’s final and perhaps most profound gift to the song repertoire. This cycle, whose title evokes the legendary swan’s last song before death, moves through landscapes of longing, loss, and transcendence, setting texts by Heine and Rellstab with visionary intensity. Together, Polenzani and Noda explore every shade of this journey, a collaboration illuminating both the aching vulnerability and the quiet, inexorable beauty that make Schwanengesang an enduring pinnacle of song.

Matthew Polenzani & Ken Noda

Embassy of France

The Perman Emerging Artist Recital series welcomes soprano Amanda Batista and a Vocal Arts favorite, pianist Myra Huang, in a vibrant and sun-drenched program celebrating the rich traditions of Spanish and Latin American song. Ranging across the Iberian peninsula and the Americas, the evening’s repertoire draws on a remarkable constellation of composers — Xavier Montsalvatge, Ernesto Lecuona, Manuel Fernández Caballero, Héctor Campos Parsi, and Carlos López Buchardo, among others — whose music weaves together folk melody, rhythmic vitality, and an irresistible warmth of spirit. These are songs that dance and sigh, that conjure moonlit plazas and tropical breezes, and that reward listeners with some of the most immediately beguiling music in song.

Amanda Batista & Myra Huang

songSLAM DC is back!  Bringing together 10 composer-performer teams debuting brand-new original art songs—each with just 5 minutes to win over the crowd. Then you take over, voting poetry slam-style to decide who walks away with the prize.

This is where bold music, storytelling, and audience energy collide.

songSLAM DC

Mezzo-soprano Natalie Lewis and pianist Myra Huang invite audiences on a journey of remarkable range and emotional depth, spanning the Romantic heartland of Brahms and Mahler to the profound American spiritual tradition. The program opens with Brahms’s irresistible Zigeunerlieder — his exuberant settings of Hungarian Romani poetry that crackle with rhythmic fire, tenderness, and an almost improvisatory sense of abandon — before turning to the orchestral richness of Mahler’s songs, works of searing introspection and visionary scope that seem to contain entire worlds within them.

Natalie Lewis & Myra Huang

Baritone Huw Montague Rendall and pianist Carrie-Ann Matheson present an evening of searching song, opening with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s beloved Songs of Travel — settings of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poetry that follow a wanderer’s journey through the English countryside and beyond. The program continues with Jonathan Dove’s Three Love Songs, works of lyricism and harmonic freshness from one of Britain’s most gifted and approachable contemporary composers, before turning to Arnold Schoenberg’s Vier Lieder — intimate and harmonically adventurous songs that find the composer at a pivotal moment of transition, one foot still in the lush world of late Romanticism, the other reaching boldly toward a new musical language.

The evening culminates in one of the great song cycles of the orchestral repertoire: Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen — Songs of a Wayfarer — here performed in the rarely heard but deeply rewarding version for voice and piano. This aching set, written in the shadow of a lost love, follows its wanderer through grief and fleeting consolation, ultimately finding a kind of bittersweet peace beneath a linden tree.