Events

Four composers from diverse backgrounds – Samuel Adler, Victoria Bond, Dina Koston, and Nehemiah Luckett – offer very personal interpretations of the dreams that have lured immigrants from all around the world to America’s shores. Performed by Ensemble Cygnus and singers.

Each year, The Village Trip brings together composers with deep ties to Greenwich Village and the East Village for an evening celebrating Village Voices. This year's program draws on an extraordinary range of voices — and histories – featuring premieres by Scott Wheeler, and Ella Milch-Sheriff, as well as new settings of Herman Melville by Akemi Naito and Kile Smith.

An intimate evening in the company of Allen Shawn, author, pianist, and composer whose six-year sojourn in the West Village marked a creative turning point when – influenced by his friendship with clarinetist Benny Goodman – he began blending classical music with elements of jazz. His lively music is characterized by emotional directness and an openness to a variety of idioms. “Notes from a Life” is a sonic diary featuring chamber pieces from across four decades by this multifaceted musician celebrated for his “distinctly urban energy.”

What better way to end the second Saturday of The Village Trip than in the warm company of the Peoples’ Voice Café, featuring Pamela Jean Agaloos, a familiar face on New York’s Irish/Scottish trad scene, and Cactus Rose NYC, a Native Americana act from Lenapehoking.

Classical Cool is the festival’s annual concert for children and families and this year, with Ich Bin Ein New Yorker, it honors the New York spirit and the East Village community at its heart. Hosted by Nina Bernstein Simmons, the program features excerpts from Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, and his "Ode to Freedom" from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, performed at his Christmas concert in Berlin in 1989, a year of hope and peaceful revolutions. Classical Cool also features premières by Shoko Suzuki, and William Kentner Anderson. Community African drummers under Amos Gabia and local choral ensembles join The Village Trip Festival Orchestra, conducted by Garrett Keast of the Berlin American Academy of Music. Featured soloists include the winner of our Concerto Competition, and soprano Curtlyn Ifill.

The Village Trip is proud to be working with Rod MacDonald and Raymond Micek to co-present The Greenwich Village Folk Festival at 40, a very special all-star celebration of the rich legacy of folk music in the Village. In the 1960s, the sounds of the folk revival reverberated around the world, but the roots of that revival can be traced back to the 1940s when the neighborhood was a cheap, bohemian refuge for radicals, artists, and writers – among them Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, both of whom sang in the Great Hall at Cooper Union where the folk community will gather once more to raise its voice in song.