BMP: SONGBOOK CONCERT & CELEBRATIONBMP: SONGBOOK CONCERT & CELEBRATION

Recipient of the Musical America Award for Best Artist of the Year and Agent of Change and a Kennedy Center Next50 Honoree, Beth Morrison is hailed as a “contemporary opera mastermind” (LA Times) and “a powerhouse leading the industry to new heights” (WQXR), Beth Morrison is an opera and theatre producer, President and Creative Producer of Beth Morrison Projects, and Founding co-Director of the PROTOTYPE Festival.

Beth created Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) in 2006 to identify and support the work of emerging and established living composers, and to create a new kind of opera (“Beth Morrison is her own genre”-Opera News). BMP is celebrated as having been an industry disruptor and is now a tastemaker at the forefront of musical and theatrical innovation by commissioning, developing, producing and touring the groundbreaking new works of a diverse group of living composers and their collaborators, which take the form of opera-theatre, music-theatre, and vocal-theatre.

BMP encourages risk-taking and the result is provocative works that represent a dynamic and lasting legacy for a new American canon. Opera News has noted: “More than any other figure in the opera industry, Beth Morrison has helped propel the art form into the twenty-first century." In 2013 Beth co-founded the PROTOTYPE Festival with HERE, which has become “essential to the evolution of American opera.” (New Yorker). Beth served a founding tenure as Producer for the Yale Institute for Music Theatre, as well as Producer for New York City Opera's VOX: Contemporary American Opera Lab. She first honed her management skills as the Administrative Director for the Boston University Tanglewood Institute. She is currently an advisory board member of National Sawdust and Brooklyn Youth Chorus, as well as a board member of Opera America, the international competition, Music Theatre Now and Voices 21C, a social justice choir. Morrison is frequently asked to give lectures at conservatories across the country, including Yale, Mannes School of Music, NYU, Manhattan School of Music, Arizona State University, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and more. Morrison is also in demand as a speaker both nationally and internationally and has delivered key note speeches for Classical:Next and Opera Europa among others. Morrison holds a Bachelor of Music from Boston University, a Master of Music from Arizona State University, and an MFA from Yale School of Drama.

Kazem Abdullah works internationally, appearing with orchestras such as Atlanta Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Orquestra de São Paulo, New World Symphony, as well as guest conducting with The Metropolitan Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Théâtre du Châtelet de Paris. He was the music director for the symphony orchestra and opera house of Aachen, Germany from 2012-2017.

Contemporaneous is an ensemble of 25 musicians whose mission is to bring to life the most transformative music by living composers through performances, commissions, recordings, and educational programs. Described as "exact and detailed, but also lively and openly dancing"(The New York Times) and "leading new music towards its better self" (I Care If You Listen),Contemporaneous particularly champions the creation of large-scale works and “dream projects,” which composers might not otherwise have opportunities to realize due to scale.Based in New York City and active throughout the United States, Contemporaneous has premiered over 200 new works, and has been presented by such institutions as Carnegie Hall,Lincoln Center, Park Avenue Armory, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Walt Disney Concert Hall,PROTOTYPE Festival, Merkin Concert Hall, MATA Festival, St. Ann’s Warehouse, and Bang on a Can and has worked with such artists as David Byrne, Donnacha Dennehy, Iarla Ó Lionáird, Dawn Upshaw, and Julia Wolfe. Contemporaneous' programming has also received acclaim from community members, artists, and press of all kinds, with the ensemble’s recent performance of Stranger Love being listed as one of 2023’s“best classical music performances”by the New York Times.Contemporaneous also leads participatory programs for public school students in the communities where the ensemble performs. These workshops are designed to instill a passion for new music and to convey the power of careful listening and meaningful expression through music. The ensemble has held residencies at such institutions as Colgate University, HamiltonCollege, City University of New York, the University of New Orleans, Williams College, and BardCollege, where the group was founded in 2010. Contemporaneous is a federally tax-exempt not-for-profit organization, supported by a dedicated community of listeners.