Rachel and pianist extraordinaire Xak Bjerken will perform a set of Ives songs on this celebration concert. Gil Kalish will also perform Ives’s iconic 1st Piano Sonata. Not to be missed!

Rachel will teach participants at the North American Festival of Wales how to accurately pronounce Welsh and to apply it to their hymn singing.

Check out the full listing of events here.

Baritone Jeffrey Williams and I will be presenting a lecture at the 2024 NATS National Conference in Knoxville on Welsh art song and diction. Don’t miss this fantastic introduction complete with performances!

Rachel joins the Ithaca Community Chorus again for a performance of Kolday’s little performed Te Deum.

Rachel will join Cornell’s Ensemble X, Jean Bernard Cerin, and Elizabeth Ogonek for excerpts of Saariajo’s Tempest Songbook in honor of her recent death.

Rachel returns to Long Island to perform on the concert series Le Petit Salon de Musique. She’ll be joined by Andrea Christie on piano and the two will perform a recital focused on the many ways that people’s voices and artistic expressions can be inhibited, excluded, muted, and restricted.

The first half of the program features songs by two female Welsh composers – Morfydd Owen and Grace Williams – almost completely unknown outside of Wales. Despite the high quality of their work, their songs have not made it into the main-stream canon of British music, in part due to still-existing cultural prejudices within the UK. The second half of the program explores other methods of suppression: racism, incarceration, and conflict. Until recently and certainly during their lifetimes, African American composers such as Margaret Bonds did not receive the recognition or performance opportunities that they deserved within the US music industry due to longstanding racism and exclusion. Ethnicity, paired with religion, is also the reason that Abduquadir Jalalidin, a well-known Uyghur poet, is being held in captivity in China. This poem escaped its confinement through oral transmission from prisoner to prisoner, eventually being translated into English by Joshua Freeman and set to music by Thomas Osborne. But countless other works of art and their artists remain trapped. And though he lived for many years after completing his Op. 38 songs, Sergei Rachmaninoff, who was forced to flee his native Russia during the Revolution of 1917, never wrote another song. What had been a prolific career in composition was silenced by his displacement and emigration. If these artists’ voices had been allowed to fully flourish and their works fully welcomed into our canon, our artistic landscape may be even richer.

Le Petit Salon de Musique

Rachel will make her debut with the Orchestra of the Southern Finger Lakes on their holiday concert. She’ll join the orchestra for Mozart’s Laudate Dominum and experts from his Exultate Jubilate. Don’t miss other holiday favorites and a sing along!

Orchestra of the Southern Finger Lakes

Rachel will be playing the role of the iconic Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Opera Ithaca’s production of Scalia/Ginsburg by Derrick Wang. Join us for an irreverent romp around the opinions and philosophies of these two unlikely friends.

Opera Ithaca

Rachel will be playing the role of the iconic Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Opera Ithaca’s production of Scalia/Ginsburg by Derrick Wang. Join us for an irreverent romp around the opinions and philosophies of these two unlikely friends.

Opera Ithaca

Rachel will join Cornell’s Xak Bjerken for a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Op. 38 songs at the A.D. White House Salon Series, sponsored by Cornell’s Center for Historical Keyboards. The intimate chamber music space has limited seating, so get your tickets early!

Cornell Center for Historical Keyboards

Rachel returns to Long Island to perform on the concert series Le Petit Salon de Musique. She’ll be joined by Andrea Christie on piano and the two will perform a recital focused on the many ways that people’s voices and artistic expressions can be inhibited, excluded, muted, and restricted.

The first half of the program features songs by two female Welsh composers – Morfydd Owen and Grace Williams – almost completely unknown outside of Wales. Despite the high quality of their work, their songs have not made it into the main-stream canon of British music, in part due to still-existing cultural prejudices within the UK. The second half of the program explores other methods of suppression: racism, incarceration, and conflict. Until recently and certainly during their lifetimes, African American composers such as Margaret Bonds did not receive the recognition or performance opportunities that they deserved within the US music industry due to longstanding racism and exclusion. Ethnicity, paired with religion, is also the reason that Abduquadir Jalalidin, a well-known Uyghur poet, is being held in captivity in China. This poem escaped its confinement through oral transmission from prisoner to prisoner, eventually being translated into English by Joshua Freeman and set to music by Thomas Osborne. But countless other works of art and their artists remain trapped. And though he lived for many years after completing his Op. 38 songs, Sergei Rachmaninoff, who was forced to flee his native Russia during the Revolution of 1917, never wrote another song. What had been a prolific career in composition was silenced by his displacement and emigration. If these artists’ voices had been allowed to fully flourish and their works fully welcomed into our canon, our artistic landscape may be even richer.

Le Petit Salon de Musique

Returning to Ithaca College, I’ll be joined by the incredible Xak Bjeerken on piano. We’ll be performing a program that explores the many ways that people’s voices and artistic expressions can be inhibited, excluded, muted, and restricted. The first half of the program features songs by three Welsh composers – Morfydd Owen, William Mathias, and Grace Williams – almost completely unknown outside of Wales. Despite the high quality of their work, their songs have not made it into the main-stream canon of British music, in part due to still-existing cultural prejudices within the UK. The second half of the program explores other methods of suppression: racism, incarceration, and conflict. Until recently and certainly during their lifetimes, African American composers such as Harry T. Burleigh, William Grant Still, and Margaret Bonds did not receive the recognition or performance opportunities that they deserved within the US music industry due to longstanding racism and exclusion. Ethnicity, paired with religion, is also the reason that Abduquadir Jalalidin, a well-known Uyghur poet, is being held in captivity in China. This poem escaped its confinement through oral transmission from prisoner to prisoner, eventually being translated into English by Joshua Freeman and set to music by Thomas Osborne. But countless other works of art and their artists remain trapped. And though he lived for many years after completing his Op. 38 songs, Sergei Rachmaninoff, who was forced to flee his native Russia during the Revolution of 1917, never wrote another song. What had been a prolific career in composition was silenced by his displacement and emigration. If these artists’ voices had been allowed to fully flourish and their works fully welcomed into our canon, our artistic landscape may be even richer.

More details to come soon!

I’m looking forward to joining the Cornell Choral and their director Michael Poll for the first time singing a favorite of mine, Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass.

I’ll be presenting a recital featuring the music of underrepresented voices including Welsh female composer Morfydd Owen, immigrants’ stories in the form of Vignettes: Ellis Island by Alan Smith, and a set of songs by Black composers Harry T. Burleigh, William Grant Still, and Florence Price. Following the recital, I’ll offer a masterclass to current SUNY Schenectady students and a Q&A session.

Featuring music by Ithaca-connected composers, Rachel joins her college Mary Holzhauer in giving the world premier of Dana Wilson’s “The Most Sacred of Times” which was written about and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rachel will return to the Oneonta Concert Association recital series to offer a solo recital of American music with pianist extraordinaire Xak Bjerken. They’ll be performing a program of American music including Stephen Foster, Amy Beach, Charles Ives, Florence Price, William Grant Still, Harry Burleigh, Alan Smith, Thomas Osborne, Chen Yi, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Ira Gershwin and Stephen Sondheim.

Rachel will make her debut solo recital at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall, sponsored by the Pro Musicis Foundation. She’ll be joined by long-time collaborator Timothy Long at the piano and they’ll perform a program based around the theme of resilience. The two will perform Margaret Bond’s Songs of the Seasons, Libby Larsen’s Songs from Letters, excerpts from Alan Smith’s Vignettes: Ellis Island, Rachmaninoff’s Op. 38 songs, and will give the world premier of a newly commissioned piece by Thomas Osborne based on a poem by the incarcerated Uighur poet Abduqadir Jalalidin (translated by Joshua Freeman).

Carnegie Hall

Rachel will be returning to one of her favorite roles, Susanna in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, with Opera Ithaca.

Opera Ithaca

Rachel will be returning to one of her favorite roles, Susanna in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, with Opera Ithaca.

Opera Ithaca

Rachel will be returning to one of her favorite roles, Susanna in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, with Opera Ithaca.

Opera Ithaca

Rachel will be returning to one of her favorite roles, Susanna in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, with Opera Ithaca.

Opera Ithaca

Rachel will perform Bach’s iconic Jauchzet Gott cantata (#51) and Karin Renqvist’s David’s Nimm on the closing concert of this summer’s season. For the Bach, she’ll join Ansel Norris on trumpet; Leonard Fu, Yiliang Jiang on violin; Maria Lambros on viola; Aaron Wolff on cello; and Pete Walsh and Stephen Coxe, continuo and will collaborate with sopranos Kristina Bachrach and Lucy Shelton on the Renqvist.

Yellow Barn

Rachel will perform Karol Szymanowski’s gorgeous Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin with Alice Chenyang Xu on Piano.

Yellow Barn

Rachel will perform Sofia Gubaidulina’s Hommage à T.S. Eliot with Yasmina Spiegelberg, clarinet; Yen-Chen Wu, bassoon; Nicolee Kuester, French horn; Sophia Anna Szokolay, Hee-Soo Yoon, violins; Emily Brandenburg, viola; Rainer Crosett, cello; and Pete Walsh, double bass.

Yellow Barn

Rachel will return to the Oneonta Concert Association recital series to offer a solo recital of American music. Stay tuned for more info on the program!

Rachel will make her debut solo recital at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Hall, sponsored by the Pro Musicis Foundation. Stay tuned for more program info.

Rachel will be returning to one of her favorite roles, Susanna in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, with Opera Ithaca.

Opera Ithaca