Outstanding Talents Singled Out in
2008 Lotte Lenya Competition

Eight talented young singing actors won prizes totaling $37,500 in the finals of the 2008 Lotte Lenya Competition, held on 12 April 2008 at the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY. First prize of $10,000 was captured by mezzo-soprano Rebecca Jo Loeb, 25, a Graduate Diploma student at New York's Juilliard School. Ariela Morgenstern, mezzo-soprano, 29, currently appearing in Adding Machine Off-Broadway, won the Second Prize of $7,500. Twin Third Prizes of $5,000 each were extended to Bray Wilkins, tenor, 27, and Maija Skille, mezzo-soprano, 30, representing a wide swath of geography: Wilkins comes from Moscow (Idaho), and Skille is a Norwegian student at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki (Finland). Coincidentally, another Competition winner was Norwegian--Tora Augestad, mezzo-soprano, 28, who now lives in Berlin, was awarded a Lys Symonette Award (named in honor of Kurt Weill’s musical assistant on Broadway) of $2,500 for her committed performances of a newly-composed opera aria and Weill's "Surabaya Johnny." Other $2,500 Symonette Awards were earned by Lauren Jelencovich, soprano, 23, and 22-year-old soprano Elizabeth Reiter, both of New York City, for outstanding performances of individual selections; and by baritone John Brancy of Mullica Hill, NJ, 19, for prodigious vocal promise.

Judges for the 2008 finals were Victoria Clark, Tony Award-winning star of The Light in the Piazza; conductor James Holmes, Head of Music at Opera North in Leeds, England; and Theodore S. Chapin, President of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization. James Holmes said, "The Lotte Lenya Competition bridges two very different worlds, following the example of Lenya's husband Kurt Weill, whose compositions uniquely spanned the genres of opera and Broadway musical theater." Holmes praised the finalists for their courage to segue from one style to another, and for their ability to express the thoughts behind the text.

The 2008 Lenya Competition attracted over 160 young artists, with regional winners chosen from live auditions in Rochester, New York City, and Lawrence, KS, and from video submissions. Each contestant was required to present a diverse program including an opera/operetta aria, an American musical theater number, and two contrasting Kurt Weill selections. In addition to the prizewinners above, other regional winner/finalists were Diana Rose Becker, 22, soprano (East Northport, NY); Candice Bondank, 23, soprano (Lawrence, KS); Steven Ebel, 28, tenor (Astoria, NY); Steven Herring, 32, baritone (New York, NY); Ashley Logan, 25, soprano (Princeton, NJ); Margaret Peterson, 22, mezzo-soprano (New York, NY); and Michael Scarcelle, 32, bass-baritone (New York, NY).

Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, the Lotte Lenya Competition was founded by the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in 1998 to encourage versatile singing actors who are convincing in a wide variety of musical theater styles. Previous winners include rising opera singers Elaine Alvarez (Mimì, Lyric Opera of Chicago), Nicole Cabell (2005 Cardiff Singer of the World), and Rodell Rosel (Chicago Lyric and Houston Grand Opera); and recent Broadway debutants Amy Justman (Company), Richard Todd Adams (The Woman in White, The Pirate Queen), and Erik Liberman (LoveMusik). Other prizewinners are appearing in national touring companies of Broadway shows and regional opera companies.

2008 Lotte Lenya Competition
Showcases Budding Stars

Eastman School of Music Hosts International Competition

Fifteen exceptionally talented young singing actors from the United States and Europe will compete for prizes of more than $25,000 in the finals of the 2008 Lotte Lenya Competition in Rochester, New York, on 12 April. Traveling to Rochester from as far away as Berlin and Helsinki, this year's finalists have an unusually wide range of performing experience: from opera to cabaret and avant-garde music, from the Off-Broadway stage to jazz and rock. Judges for this year's finals are equally diverse: Broadway star Victoria Clark, Tony Award-winning leading lady of The Light in the Piazza, also an esteemed director and teacher; Theodore S. Chapin, President of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization and author of the book Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical "Follies"; and James Holmes, conductor of opera, American musicals, and concerts, including many Kurt Weill productions, in Great Britain and across Europe.

Chosen from more than 160 contestants at regional competitions and video submissions, each finalist will present a varied program, including an opera/operetta aria, an American musical theater number, and two contrasting Kurt Weill selections. The contestants are:

  • Tora Augestad, 28, mezzo-soprano (Berlin, Germany)
  • Diana Rose Becker, 22, soprano (East Northport, NY)
  • Candice Bondank, 23, soprano (Lawrence, KS)
  • John Brancy, 19, baritone (Mullica Hill, NJ)
  • Steven Ebel, 28, tenor (Astoria, NY)
  • Steven Herring, 32, baritone (New York, NY)
  • Lauren Jelencovich, 23, soprano (New York, NY)
  • Rebecca Jo Loeb, 25, mezzo-soprano (New York, NY)
  • Ashley Logan, 25, soprano (Princeton, NJ)
  • Ariela Morgenstern, 29, mezzo-soprano (Brooklyn, NY)
  • Margaret Peterson, 22, mezzo-soprano (New York, NY)
  • Elizabeth Reiter, 22, soprano (New York, NY)
  • Michael Scarcelle, 32, bass-baritone (New York, NY)
  • Maija Skille, 30, mezzo-soprano (Helsinki, Finland)
  • Bray Wilkins, 27, tenor (Moscow, ID)

Previous winners of the Lenya Competition continue to light up major opera and musical theater stages, demonstrating their versatility. Elaine Alvarez (2003 prizewinner) made a critically acclaimed debut at Lyric Opera of Chicago in fall 2007, portraying Mimì in La bohème; other prizewinners have appeared at the Metropolitan Opera and Deutsche Oper Berlin. Past winners Richard Todd Adams, Amy Justman, and Erik Liberman have played roles in Broadway musicals, and Justman's performance in Company was broadcast nationwide this winter by PBS.

The day-long finals at Eastman School of Music's Kilbourn Hall offer the audience a chance to be on the spot when a new star is discovered. The first round, when each contestant will sing his/her full 13-minute program, runs from 11 a.m until 3:15 p.m. The evening concert featuring all finalists begins at 8 p.m., and winners will be announced immediately thereafter.

Contact: Carolyn Weber, Kurt Weill Foundation, 212.505.5240, cweber@kwf.org.

2007 Kurt Weill Prize to bruce mcclung

The 2007 Kurt Weill Prize for outstanding scholarship on twentieth-century musical theater, carrying a cash award of $2500, has been awarded to bruce d. mcclung, Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Cincinnati – College Conservatory of Music, for his book, Lady in the Dark: Biography of a Musical (Oxford University Press, 2006). In his production history incorporating scripts, correspondence, clippings from Gertrude Lawrence's scrapbooks, and other artifacts, mcclung traces a revolutionary and controversial work through its Broadway run, national tour, and revivals. Lady in the Dark: Biography of a Musical also received the George Freedley Award, 2006 Special Jury Prize, from the Theatre Library Association.

In addition to the book prize, a $500 Kurt Weill Prize for outstanding article has been awarded to Elizabeth B. Crist, Assistant Professor of Music at Princeton University, for "Mutual Responses in the Midst of an Era: Aaron Copland's The Tender Land and Leonard Bernstein's Candide" (The Journal of Musicology, Volume 23, Issue 4, fall 2006). In her article Crist compares a pair of stage works critical of McCarthyism, with special focus on two crucial musical ensembles, and examines the works' broader political implications.

The Kurt Weill Prize is awarded biennially for distinguished scholarship on twentieth-century musical theater, and the 2007 prize covered books and articles first published in the calendar years 2005 and 2006. The 2007 four-member selection panel consisted of representatives from the Modern Language Association, the American Musicological Society, the American Society for Theatre Research, and the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music.

Kurt Weill’s Der Protagonist Is Published

The Kurt Weill Foundation for Music and European American Music Corporation are pleased to announce the publication of Kurt Weill's first opera, the one-acter Der Protagonist (1925) with a libretto by Georg Kaiser. Edited by Dr. Gunther Diehl of Wiesbaden, Germany, and Jürgen Selk (former Managing Editor of the Kurt Weill Edition), the volume publishes Weill's orchestral score for the first time.

Completed in Berlin in March 1925 and given its premiere at the Dresden Staatsoper on 27 March 1926, Der Protagonist occupies a special place in Weill's oeuvre. It was his first opera, written at age twenty-five, and belongs to a series of early compositions that systematically explored almost every musical genre: chamber music, choral music, lieder, orchestral works, and ballet. The opera is the climax of Weill's early development and no other work is so characteristic of his early style.

With the successful premiere of the opera on 27 March 1926, conducted by the eminent Fritz Busch, Weill not only achieved a spectacular breakthrough as a composer but also immediately rose to prominence among the young composers identified at the time with the renewal of the "crisis-ridden genre" of opera.

Der Protagonist marks Weill’s first significant collaboration with another artist. Georg Kaiser (1878–1945) was an outstanding representative of expressionist drama. Along with Gerhart Hauptmann he was the most performed German playwright during the Weimar Republic, with some forty premieres of his plays.

The next volumes in the Kurt Weill Edition, currently in production, are: Music with Solo Violin (Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra, op. 12, and Der neue Orpheus, op. 16), edited by Andreas Eichhorn; Popular Adaptations, 1927–1950 (edited by Charles Hamm); and Zaubernacht (edited by Elmar Juchem and Andrew Kuster).

Rising Stars Selected at 2007 Lotte Lenya Competition

Winners Display Substantial Voices and Acting Talent

Seven outstanding young singing actors were winners in the finals of the 2007 Lotte Lenya Competition for Singers, held on 21 April 2007 at the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY. First prize of $7,500 was garnered by tenor James Benjamin Rodgers, 26, a New Zealand-born graduate student at the Manhattan School of Music, New York City. Analisa Leaming, soprano, a 22-year-old student at the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY, won the $5,000 second prize; and twin third prizes of $3,000 each were awarded to baritone Christopher Herbert, 26, and soprano Leena Chopra, 27, both of New York City. In addition to the above prizewinners, special recognition was given to three other contestants: bass Paul Corona, 23, of Chicago, IL, and soprano Jeanine De Bique, 25, of New York City were awarded Lys Symonette Awards for Outstanding Vocal Talent; and tenor/sopranist Brian Charles Rooney, 29, of New York City won the Lys Symonette Award for Outstanding Dramatic Talent. The awards, named in honor of Kurt Weill’s musical assistant on Broadway, each carried a cash value of $2,000.

The 2007 Lenya Competition attracted over 150 young artists, hailing from as far away as Argentina and Turkey; regional auditions were held in Chicago, Boston, Rochester, Lawrence, KS, and New York City. Other finalists were Sharon O’Connell Campbell, mezzo-soprano (Lawrence, KS), Julia Cramer, soprano (Rochester, NY), Cooper Grodin, tenor (New York City), Kendall Lima, soprano (New York City), Elizabeth Mitchell, soprano (Ann Arbor, MI), Tyler Simpson, bass-baritone (Lawrence, KS) and Hayley Thompson-King, mezzo-soprano (New York City).

The Lotte Lenya Competition was founded by the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in 1998 to encourage versatile singing actors who are convincing in a wide variety of musical theater styles. Each contestant was required to present a diverse program including an opera/operetta aria, an American musical theater number, and two contrasting Kurt Weill selections. Judges for the 2007 finals were world-renowned soprano Teresa Stratas; conductor and director Ted Sperling (also Audra McDonald's music director); and Theodore S. Chapin, President of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization.

Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, the Lenya Competition has grown from a local student contest in Rochester to an international competition for the best young professionals and students. Previous winners have gone on to careers in both opera and musical theater: 2004 winners Amy Justman and Richard Todd Adams are featured in the Broadway productions of Company and The Pirate Queen; Nicole Cabell (Special Prize, 2002) was named BBC Cardiff Singer of the World in 2005 and now has a major opera career; Erik Liberman (2005) is currently making his Broadway debut in LoveMusik, the new musical by Alfred Uhry about Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, directed by Harold Prince, opening 3 May. Others are singing with major opera companies, appearing in national touring companies of Broadway shows, and claiming spots in the leading young artist training programs around the country.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about The Threepenny Opera!

www.threepennyopera.org

The Kurt Weill Foundation for Music is proud to announce an entirely new website devoted exclusively to one of the most famous shows in the history of musical theater, The Threepenny Opera. Two major revivals in 2006--on Broadway (Roundabout Theatre, opening April 20) and in Berlin (Admiralspalast, opening August 11)--provide a perfect opportunity to highlight this legendary musical on the web. Point your browser to www.threepennyopera.org to explore the site.

The site includes galleries of historic posters and famous Macheaths, audio files from interviews with Lotte Lenya and Jerry Orbach, information on major productions, an in-depth look at the music for the show, a calendar of performances, great quotes, two quizzes, a detailed synopsis, and more!

A milestone of 20th century musical theater, The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) rolls on unstoppably into the 21st. In their opera "by and for beggars," composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950) and playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) transformed saccharine, old-fashioned opera and operetta forms, incorporating a sharp political perspective and the sound of 1920s Berlin dance bands and cabaret. Weill's acid harmonies and Brecht's biting texts created a revolutionary new musical theater that inspired such subsequent hits as Cabaret, Chicago, and Urinetown. The show's opening number, "Mack the Knife," became one of the top popular songs of the century.

Lys Symonette (1914-2005)

Last Artistic Link to Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya dies at age 90

Lys Symonette, Kurt Weill's musical assistant on Broadway from 1945 to 1950, and Lotte Lenya's accompanist and musical advisor from 1950 to 1981, died of a heart attack in Windsor, New York, on Sunday, 27 November, at the age of 90. At the time of her death, she was still active as vice-president of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, as well as its musical executive, having been appointed to that responsibility for Weill's legacy in Lotte Lenya's will in 1981.

Born Bertlies Weinschenk in Mainz, Germany, to Jewish parents in 1914, she began her musical studies with Lothar Windsperger at the Peter Cornelius Conservatory in Mainz. In 1936 she fled Germany and arrived in the U.S. via Italy and Cuba, with the aid of the Leventritt family. Shortly thereafter, she enrolled as a piano and voice student at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where she studied with Vera Brodsky and Elisabeth Schumann, respectively. There she met composer Ned Rorem and subsequently was the first singer to perform his songs in public. In the early 1940s she appeared regularly in clubs with Alberta Masiello (who later became an assistant conductor at the Met and a Texaco broadcast intermission fixture for 40 years) as the two-piano team, "Yola and Lisa" (the Mexican sisters).

After seeing Lady in the Dark and On the Town on Broadway, she took a lively interest in the American musical theater. In 1945 she landed her first job as rehearsal pianist on the recommendation of Maurice Abravanel, conductor of Weill's and Ira Gershwin's ill-fated Broadway operetta, The Firebrand of Florence. Because she could also sing, she doubled, under the stage name Lys Bert, as "swing girl" for the chorus. When a young Billy Dee Williams couldn't sing "Make Way for the Duchess" for the grand entrance of Lotte Lenya in her Broadway musical debut, Lys sang his part offstage. For the next 60 years, she would devote her talents to Weill's work and Lenya's career.

She played backers' auditions and coached the singers for Weill's Broadway opera Street Scene, as well as his and Alan Jay Lerner's "concept musical" Love Life, and finally the musical tragedy Lost in the Stars, starring Todd Duncan and directed by Rouben Mamoulian. She also served as the young Julius Rudel's assistant for summer stock, and in 1949 she commenced her career as a translator with Weill's one-act comic opera, The Czar Has His Photograph Taken, at the Metropolitan Opera Studio. Shortly after Weill's untimely death in 1950, Lys married the bass-baritone Randolph Symonette (1910-1998), who had played the Hangman in Firebrand. For the next decade she devoted her energies largely to her husband's career in German opera houses, coaching him in the German repertory, especially the great Wagnerian roles which he initially had to learn phonetically. In 1955 her translation of Street Scene premiered at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Dusseldorf, a major milestone in the European reception of the then-unknown American Weill. That year she also sang the role of the Mother on the MGM recording of Weill's school opera, Der Jasager. Subsequently her translation of Lost in the Stars (Der weite Weg) debuted in Nuremberg.

After a decade in Germany, she and her husband returned to New York, where he sang at the Met and she accompanied Lotte Lenya for performances of Brecht on Brecht off-Broadway at the Theater de Lys. For the next twenty years, she would serve as Lenya's accompanist and musical advisor. She also adapted Weill's unfinished score for Huckleberry Finn (Maxwell Anderson) as a film musical for German television, and in 1968 moved to Tallahassee with her husband, who taught voice at Florida State University. In 1970, artistic and legal disputes over Carmen Capalbo's off-Broadway production of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny brought her back to New York as Lenya's musical representative at rehearsals and performances, and ultimately Lys shared translation credit for the libretto with poet Arnold Weinstein.

In 1974 she joined the faculty of the Curtis Institute as vocal coach, and assumed more and more responsiblities as Lenya's assistant. In 1978 she and librettist Robert Vambery collaborated on a new version of Weill's satirical operetta Der Kuhhandel (a new production of which by David Pountney will open next spring at Opera North and then move to the Vienna Volksoper). Using unpublished incidental music from some of Weill's forgotten German works, Lys collaborated with Harold Prince on his production of Hugh Wheeler's adaptation of Der Silbersee (Silverlake) at New York City Opera. In response to Teresa Stratas's spectacular portrayal of Jenny in Mahagonny at the Metropolitan Opera in 1979, Lys assembled a collection of unpublished Weill songs for Stratas which resulted in the award-winning Nonesuch recording The Unknown Kurt Weill, as well as the songbook of the same title, which Lys edited. As a direct result of her efforts, those songs have now entered the standard vocal repertory.

Shortly before her death in 1981, Lenya, with Lys's counsel, hand-picked a group of trusted friends and colleagues, including Julius Rudel and Harold Prince, to serve as trustees of the Kurt Weill Foundation, which had been incorporated in 1962 but had hitherto lain dormant as a seldom-used tax shelter. In her will, Lenya designated the Foundation her principal heir and adminstrator of Weill's copyrights and named Lys its musical executive. Also elected the Foundation's vice-president, Lys and Kim Kowalke, Lenya's successor as president, salvaged as much archival material as possible from Lenya's house in Rockland County and began the process of establishing the Foundation as a vital non-profit educational organization devoted to the protection and promotion of Weill's legacy. The initially asset-less Foundation soon opened the Weill-Lenya Research Center in New York, initiated an annual grants program (which to date has distributed two million dollars to arts organizations, schools, scholars, and students), and launched a critical edition of Weill's music, as well as an annual singing competition in Lenya's honor.

After resigning from the Curtis faculty in 1985, Lys devoted her energies full-time to her Foundation responsibilities, translating and editing Weill's works, and supervising productions, broadcasts, and recordings of Weill's music, especially in Europe. She took particular joy in nurturing the talent of young singers and conductors and was a moving force in establishing an annual Weill festival in his home town of Dessau. For several years she worked with Burgess Meredith on a new version of Johnny Johnson, which was never produced. In 1996 her and Kowalke's edition of the Weill-Lenya correspondence, Speak Low (When You Speak Love), won ASCAP's Deems Taylor Prize, the George Freedley Memorial Award, and was named a notable book of the year by both the New York Times and the Financial Times (London). The book appeared in German two years later, and it is now being adapted as a German television mini-series and as a musical play by Hal Prince and Alfred Uhry. Publication in 2000 of her edition of Weill's letters to his family coincided with the centenary celebration of Weill's birth, and Lys played a key role in major festivals around the world, including the New York Philharmonic premiere of a concert version of Street Scene. At the time of her death, she was still actively engaged in the work of the Foundation.

In 1998, the Board of Trustees honored Lys as the third recipient of its "Lifetime Achievement Award." A consummate musician and coach, a sensitive translator of German into English and vice versa, she was, as Hal Prince has described her, "the real thing--full of old world graces to match her brains, talent, and loyalty." With tireless energy and commitment, as well as extraordinary warmth and kindness, she devoted fully six decades of her long and productive life to the composer whose songs she had loved as a teenager in Germany and whose devotion to his adopted country and its musical theater she would passionately share.

Survivors include her son Victor, daughter-in-law Susan, grandsons Adam and Chandler, and sister Ingrid. She was much loved and will be sorely missed. She was the last and irreplaceable link to the inner artistic circle of Weill and Lenya.

Kim H. Kowalke
President, Kurt Weill Foundation for Music