And you thought the gift-giving season was over:
The 2016 Tucson Desert Song Festival has got a doozy of a present for Tucsonans.
Now in its fourth year, the close-to-three-week fest brings some of the world’s leading classical singers to Tucson. They will perform with eight local arts organizations, teach master classes and pair their prodigious talent in unique collaborations. The festival, with its 2016 theme “Of Poets and Passion,” kicks off Thursday, Jan. 21, and continues through Feb. 7 with a distinctive Latin flair.
“I believe we are on our way to becoming an international destination festival,” said former Tucson Symphony Orchestra conductor George Hanson, who became the festival’s new director in July. “The purpose of the festival is to bring great singers to Tucson … singers who are regularly appearing on the great stages of the world.”
“There is a strong Latin feature to it this year,” said Jack Forsythe, the festival’s founder and board president. “I’m glad because we work really hard but it doesn’t always have an overriding theme, but that’s what we’ve been able to do this year.”
Among this year’s highlights are the Arizona Opera’s “Carmen” with San Francisco Opera mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack; Ballet Tucson and Tucson Guitar Society’s Rhythms of the Americas with renowned flamenco guitarist Adam del Monte and baritone Bernardo Bermudez; and the TSO’s full version of Gustav Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde,” conducted by Hanson and featuring Metropolitan Opera tenor Richard Cox and Grammy-winning mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke. Hanson also added a performance of Brahms’ Liebeslieder Waltzes by the Ravinia Festival’s Steans Music Institute singers, honoring the posthumous 100th birthday of conductor Robert Shaw.
The lineup also includes mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, who is BBC Cardiff Singer of the World and winner of the prestigious Richard Tucker Award; soprano Amber Wagner and tenor Alek Shrader. Barton, Wagner, and Shrader were all 2007 winners of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and were featured in the 2009 documentary “The Audition.” “That class of Met winners has had extraordinarily successful international careers thus far,” said Beth Stewart, a spokeswoman for the Tucson Desert Song Festival.
“These are exactly the kind of performers we had in mind when we started the festival,” added Forsythe. “We really got them at the right trajectory in their careers. That’s the really exciting thing.”
The other presenting arts groups include True Concord Voices & Orchestra, Tucson Guitar Society, UA Presents and the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music. New this year is the Arizona Early Music Society, which hosts the medieval vocal group The Broken Consort.
“We were trying to find a way to work cooperatively with other groups in Tucson to try to help boost our following,” said AEMS President Scott Mason. “The Broken Consort proposed this wide-range program of early traditional music, from tribal music to sacred harp music, American folk music, even touching in American bluegrass. Our hope is that this may draw some new people in.”
Hanson said the Arizona Early Music Society is a good fit with the festival. “This gives us a broader spectrum of offerings, as so much of Western culture developed in the early years, as well as the very special nature of composers’ use of the human voice in the Baroque era,” he said.
Though this year’s festival hasn’t started, Tucson Desert Song Festival organizers are already looking to 2018. Thanks to a $150,000 pledge from Dorothy Dyer Vanek and matching funds that Hanson hopes to raise, the 2018 festival will celebrate Leonard Bernstein’s 100th birthday. “The Bernstein program is going to be our slingshot into the future … and bring international attention to Tucson as a cultural center,” Hanson said.
