Village Voices

Each year, The Village Trip brings together composers with deep ties to Greenwich Village and the East Village for an evening celebrating Village Voices. This year's program draws on an extraordinary range of voices — and histories — featuring premieres by Scott Wheeler, and Ella Milch-Sheriff, as well as new settings of Herman Melville by Akemi Naito and Kile Smith. “Village Voices” opens with the world premiere of Blue Ridge, a four-movement work for saxophone and piano by Scott Wheeler, whose operas have been commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and Washington National Opera, and his music performed by Renée Fleming, Gil Shaham, and Kent Nagano. The performance features the composer at the piano alongside saxophonist Timothy Ruedeman, praised for his "extreme virtuosity" (Philadelphia Inquirer) and one of the leading voices on his instrument. Akemi Naito and Kile Smith each brings new settings of Herman Melville — a fitting Village connection, for Melville's paternal grandfather was General Peter Gansevoort, a hero of the Continental Army after whom Gansevoort Street is named. Naito, born in Tokyo and based in New York, describes her composing as "a profoundly poetic activity." Smith's music has received three Grammy nominations and has been praised by the Philadelphia Inquirer as "sublimely ... ecstatically beautiful." Ella Milch-Sheriff, winner of the Israeli Prime Minister's Prize and one of the country's most performed composers, contributes new settings for voice, cello and piano of Mascha Kaléko, a German-Jewish poet who fled Berlin and lived in exile at 1 Minetta Street from 1942 to 1959. Kaléko wrote a poem about that address, a love letter to Greenwich Village. Her verse is marked by wit, yearning, and a persistent sense of not-quite-belonging — themes that feel as present as ever. Also on the program: New music by Pulitzer Prize-winner and American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medalist Yehudi Wyner. • Oren Fader, guitar • William Anderson, mandolin • Emily John, harp • Joan Forsyth, piano • Sharon Harms, soprano • Curtlyn Ifill, soprano • Tim Ruedeman, sax • Scott Wheeler, piano