November 18, 2012
Presented by a consortium of three Long Island public libraries, and the Town of Oyster Bay Distinguished Artists Series, and in association with the RACH-C.
Dr. Olga Zatsepina was on hand to offer some opening & closing remarks at a performance during the Russian Opera Mini-Festival held on Long Island. The festival featured the staged premiere of The Wooing, an opera by Leonard Lehrman on a libretto by Abel Meeropol, based on Chekhov’s one-act play, Medved.
This as well as most of the performances are available on YouTube.
Also on the program were scenes from operas by Tchaikovsky, and a duet from Prokofiev, in Russian; and scenes in English translation from operas by Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, Borodin, Lehrman, and Marc Blitzstein.The performers included singers with Metropolitan Opera and Bronx Opera Company connections: Helene Williams, Gregory Mercer, Benjamin Spierman, and Hannah Spierman, accompanied by Leonard Lehrman, who served as Assistant Chorus Master of the Met the season that the company first sang Onegin in Russian.
Press (In English): Russia Beyond the Headlines (November 27, 2012)
All the performances were free and made possible in part with public funds from the NY State Council on the Arts Decentralization program, administered by the Huntington Arts Council, the Maldeb Foundation, and the Professor Edgar H. Lehrman Memorial Foundation for Ethics, Religion, Science & the Arts.