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Two significant musical anniversaries will be commemorated in Nassau County in August 2024:
On Saturday, August 3, 3:00-9:00 pm, Court Street Music, at 33 Court Street in Valley Stream, will celebrate its 25 years there with a free invitational concert featuring Co-Directors soprano Helene Williams and pianist/composer, Leonard Lehrman
(Harvard College Class of 1971), along with guest artists Perri Sussman (mezzo-soprano), Caryn Hartglass (soprano), Thomas Smith (baritenor), Bennett Pologe (baritone), violinist Daniel Hyman and pianist Joseph Martin. For an invitation, please email LJLehrmanDMA@gmail.com.
On Tuesday, August 20, 7:00-8:30pm, the Hewlett-Woodmere Library, 1125 Broadway, in Hewlett, will present a free program, open to the public, honoring Leonard Lehrman's 75th birthday, with songs composed, translated and/or arranged by him, again featuring Williams, Sussman and Hartglass, along with sopranos Alyssa Mener and Nancy Zucker, guest dancers Beth Jucovy and Dance Visions NY (Louisa Armstrong-Harrison, Tyler Brunson, Abby Dias, Anne Parichon, and Susan Steinman), and special guest Cantor Charles Osborne (also celebrating his 75th birthday, August 14th), flying in from Toronto for the occasion.
The Saturday program will begin with two works by Joel Mandelbaum (1932- ), who plans to be present: the first movement of his Sonata for 2 Pianos (1965) and his 2018 arrangement of Lehrman's setting of Emily Dickinson's poem, "Why Do They Shut Me Out of Heaven?" written in protest against the unjustified exclusionary action by The Long Island Composers Alliance against Lehrman, the organization's first President & Archivist, and current Archivist Emeritus.
The program will continue with two works by Long Island's only living Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec (1957- ) - who plans to be present - including one being heard for the first time anywhere. Then two short 2-piano pieces by Lehrman and two arias from his 1976 opera Sima, based on a Russian novella about a Jewish girl orphaned by a pogrom in Ukraine. The opera has been heard around the world, in four languages, and is slated (finally) to receive its NY City premiere at Theater for the New City in November, 2025.
Two Lehrman settings of poems by Alex Skovron and Kim Rich will be followed by two Strauss works: "Chacun à son goût" from Johann's Die Fledermaus (in Lehrman's translation) and the first movement of the Sonata for Violin & Piano by Richard. Then an aria from Samuel Barber's Vanessa, 7 Gypsy Songs and the "Sapphische Ode" by Brahms, a 2-piano piece by Arensky, Schubert's opus 1: "Erlkönig"; and, sandwiching a song by Alan Jay Lerner & Leonard Bernstein, two choral sings: Charles Osborne's well-known setting of Psalm 122 (in Lehrman's translation) and Helene Williams's uncle Walter Gross's standard, "Tenderly" (in Lehrman's arrangement).
The final work to be performed will be the 2-piano arrangement of Alexander Scriabin's Piano Concerto, which Lehrman began studying 60 years ago, and has read through a few times privately (including the slow movement with the late Martin Dreiwitz's Long Island Youth Orchestra), but this will be the very first time in public, with Joseph Martin. Toward the end of the evening, the video that Lehrman edited and subtitled, for private viewing, of the Gilbert & Sullivan Light Opera Company of Long Island's Princess Ida, which he conducted in 2023, will be shown.
Tuesday's concert at the library will feature two songs translated from the Yiddish and three from Romanian; three solo dances on settings of poems by Barbara Tumarkin Dunham, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Emily Dickinson; two arias from Sima; and two numbers from E.G.: A Musical Portrait of Emma Goldman. Lehrman's 2018 setting of Alex Skovron's "The Last Word," winner of the first NY State Council on the Arts Long Island Creative Individual Grant ever given to a composer, will receive its first performance with choreography. Charles Osborne will conduct his setting of Psalm 122 and repeat his incomparable duo performance with Helene Williams of Lehrman's 12 Jewish Haikus (2002). The concert will conclude with "Zelophehad's Daughters," celebrating the first successful struggle for women's right in history, performed for the first time by five singers and five dancers. The library has promised birthday cake for all attending!
The performances are co-sponsored by The Professor Edgar H. Lehrman Memorial Foundation for Ethics, Religion, Science, and the Arts, Inc., and The Maldeb Foundation. The library concert (together with an earlier Lehrman concert at The Bryant Library, March 10th, 2024) has been made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrant Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by The Huntington Arts Council, Inc.
Examples of Lehrman's recordings and books will be on display at Oyster Bay-East Norwich Public Library (where he has worked as Reference Librarian since March, 1995) and at Hewlett-Woodmere Library. Also available will be order forms for his new book - CONTINUATOR: The Autobiography of a Socially-Conscious, Cosmopolitan Composer, published by Dorrance.
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