Well-known as a champion of contemporary American piano music, Lois Svard has performed as a soloist in festivals and on series across the United States including the “Piano Sounds for Our Time” festival at the Honolulu Academy of Arts and The Lane Series at the University of Vermont. She has performed with chamber groups including the Cassatt Quartet and in a special collaboration with Peter Boal when he was a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet. Svard has premiered more than a dozen works written specifically for her and has recorded for both Lovely Music, Inc. and Innovera Studios. Fanfare magazine reported that “Svard’s performance impresses … as so in keeping with the music’s soul as to sound a syncretic marvel.”
 
http://www.loissvard.com/

Prior to directing her attentions full time to retraining for the musical theatre, Elizabeth Saunders worked internationally as a lyric mezzo-soprano. Crossover roles performed include the Old Lady in Bernstein’s Candide with the Lyric Opera of San Diego, Anna in Kurt Weill’s Die Bürgschaft at the Anhaltisches Theater Dessau’s Kurt Weill Fest and at the Opera Theatre of Pittsburgh, Meg in Brigadoon with the Annapolis Chamber Orchestra and Chorus, as well as Pops concerts with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Annapolis Chamber Orchestra, and the Unified Jazz Ensemble. She makes her New York City acting debut this July in Nathan Wright’s “Peninsula” at the Manhattan Repertory Theatre.
 
http://www.elizabethsaundersvoice.com/

Margaret Leng Tan has established herself as a major force within the American avant-garde; a highly visible, talented and visionary pianist whose work sidesteps perceived artificial boundaries within the usual concert experience and creates a new level of communication with listeners. Embracing aspects of theater, choreography, performance and even “props” such as the teapot she “plays” in Alvin Lucier’s Nothing is Real, Tan has brought to the avant-garde, a measure of good old-fashioned showmanship tempered with a disciplinary rigor inherited from her mentor John Cage. This has won Tan acceptance far beyond the norm for performers of avant-garde music, as she is regularly featured at international festivals, records often for adventurous labels such as Mode and New Albion and has appeared on American public television, at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.

Hailed by Village Voice critic Kyle Gann as one of “new music’s most valued performers,” Joseph Kubera has been recognized as a leading interpreter of contemporary music for the past 30 years. He has been soloist at such festivals as the Berlin Inventionen, the Warsaw Autumn and Prague Spring, Miami’s Subtropics Festival and Berkeley’s Edgefest. He has been pianist in residence at the Ostrava Days New Music Festival since its inception in 2001. Mr. Kubera has been awarded grants through the NEA Solo Recitalist Program and the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and was a Creative Associate with the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at SUNY Buffalo in its heyday.
 
http://www.josephkubera.com/

For more than 40 years baritone Thomas Buckner has dedicated himself to the world of new and improvised music. In collaboration with a host of prominent composers and improvisers, Buckner continues to commission and perform numerous chamber works, orchestral pieces and song cycles, as well as improvisations, electronic constructions, and multi-media theater pieces.
 
http://www.thomasbuckner.com/
 
Photo Credit: Stefan Falke, 2011

Neely Bruce, Professor of Music and American Studies at Wesleyan University, is a composer, conductor, pianist and scholar of American music. As a pianist Bruce is best known for his recordings of American music, which include popular piano pieces of the nineteenth century, works of Anthony Philip Heinrich, and The Time Curve Preludes by William Duckworth. After decades of devoting himself almost exclusively to performing the music of the United States, in 1993 he began to relearn and perform the standard repertory of his youth — the Chopin etudes, the Schubert C minor Sonata, the Brahms “Paganini” variations, sonatas by Beethoven, both volumes of The Well-Tempered Clavier and many other works. He played two all-Chopin concerts in June of 1999, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s death.

 
http://www.neelybrucemusic.com/

Kyle Gann, born 1955 in Dallas, Texas, is a composer and was new-music critic for the Village Voice from 1986 to 2005. Since 1997 he has taught at Bard College. He is the author of The Music of Conlon Nancarrow, American Music in the 20th Century, Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice, No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”, Robert Ashley, and the introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition of Cage’s Silence. Gann studied composition with Ben Johnston, Morton Feldman, and Peter Gena. Of his hundred-plus works to date, about a fourth are microtonal, using up to 37 pitches per octave. He’s received commissions from the Orkest de Volharding, the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir, the Dessoff Choir, the Relache Ensemble, pianist Sarah Cahill, and many others. His music is available on the New Albion, New World, Cold Blue, Lovely Music, Mode, Meyer Media, Brilliant Classics, New Tone, and Monroe Street labels. In 2003, the American Music Center awarded Gann its Letter of Distinction.
 
http://www.kylegann.com/
 
Photo: Jorgen Krielen