Brooklyn Art Song Society Opens Season with 'Passions I: Fin-de-Siècle'

The Brooklyn Art Song Society opens its 2026–27 season with "Passions I: Fin-de-Siècle" on Oct. 11 at Roulette in Downtown Brooklyn.

The program explores the final great surge of Romanticism before the upheavals of the 20th century. Its repertory spans songs by Joseph Marx, Hans Pfitzner, Richard Strauss, and Alexander Zemlinsky — four composers who carried the lied tradition to its late flowering in German-speaking Europe.

The performance features sopranos Kristina Bachrach and Aviva Fortunata, who makes her company debut, alongside mezzo-soprano Katherine Lerner, tenor Aaron Crouch, and baritone Brandon Bell. Pianists Michael Brofman, Brent Funderburk, and Miori Sugiyama complete the lineup.

Brofman serves as the ensemble's artistic director, and the three-piano roster signals the scale of accompaniment the society brings to its vocal programming.

The concert marks the first installment of the "Passions" series, which anchors the season's opening. Fortunata's debut adds a new voice to the company's roster; she is one of several guest artists the society announced for 2026–27, a lineup that also includes Brian James Myer, Nathaniel Sullivan, and Paul Appleby.

For the Brooklyn Art Song Society, the Oct. 11 date at Roulette sets the tone for a season devoted to the German art song canon at the moment of its last full expression before modernism reshaped the genre.