Renowned Vocalist To Give Free Performance At Ithaca College
ITHACA, NY — The Robert G. Boehmler Community Foundation series will bring Paul Sperry, American song scholar and vocalist, to Ithaca College for a series of master classes and a lecture-recital. All events are free and open to the public. Sperry will perform at a lecture-recital on Monday, Oct. 27, at 7 p.m. in the Hockett Family Recital Hall. Pianist Charis Dimaras will collaborate.
Other master classes will be held as follows:
- Friday, Oct. 24, 4 p.m., Hockett Family Recital Hall
- Saturday, Oct. 25, noon, Whalen Center room 3102
- Saturday, Oct. 25, 4 p.m., Whalen Center room 2105
- Sunday, Oct. 26, 3 p.m., Hockett Family Recital Hall
Sperry has performed with the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, the Boston and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras, the Amsterdam Concertgebauw, and the Moscow Philharmonic. His repertoire includes hundreds of songs, cycles, oratories, chamber works in more than a dozen languages, and a host of musical idioms.
Many leading composers have written especially for him. He sang the starring role of Michael in the world premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s opera “Donnerstag aus Licht” at Milan’s La Scala and premiered Jacob Druckman’s “Animus IV” for the opening of the Pompidou Center in Paris.
He also has edited collections of American songs for G. Schirmer, Peer-Southern, Boosey and Hawkes, Dover Publications, Carl Fischer, and the Oxford University Press.
Sperry is on the faculty of the Juilliard School, the Manhattan School of Music, and the Brooklyn College and Conservatory. He taught at the Aspen Music Festival and School for 24 years and directed the vocal program at the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan. In 2004 he joined the faculty of the International Vocal Arts Institute in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Since 1987 he has served as the director of “Joy in Singing,” an organization dedicated to helping young singers and American composers foster the art of song.
Sperry is coming to campus thanks to a grant from the Robert G. Boehmler Community Foundation. Boehmler, who received a bachelor’s degree from the Ithaca College School of Music in 1938 and a master’s degree in 1961, was a musician and educator who established this foundation to support education in the communities in which he lived. A music teacher in the Palmyra-Macedon (New York) School District for many years, Boehmler died in 1998.
Originally published in News Releases: Renowned Vocalist To Give Free Performance At Ithaca College.
