On March 25, Linda Marianiello interviewed New Mexico Bach Society mezzo soprano Kehar Koslowsky, who has been singing with us for the past several seasons. Artistic Director Franz Vote calls the New Mexico Bach Chorale “an ensemble of soloists.” Most members of the Chorale are soloists for our programs and also sing the choral parts for each of the works presented.

The first topic of discussion was the health emergency, due to COVID-19, and how this is affecting Kehar’s work and the cultural life of Santa Fe in general. We talked about how strange it would be if the summer 2020 festivals were canceled, due to the coronavirus.

Then, we discussed the musicians’ relief fund organized by Thomas Goodrich, one of New Mexico’s most important music educators and musicians. Among other things, Thomas teaches at United World College and New Mexico Highlands University. Taking its cue in part from this initiative, NMPAS asks our donors to please make a donation to the NMPAS Artist Relief Fund, which will assist our artists who are struggling during the cancellation of so many concerts and church engagements. We’ll provide information on how to make a donation at the conclusion of this interview.

Kehar Koslowsky has been performing since she was 4! She has been on stage for most of her life and really loves it. In fact, the women in her family are all musically active, and her grandmother was her first teacher.

At age 13, she began to take voice lessons. Before that she had already played cello since the age of 8. The experience that Kehar gained in school orchestras remains an important part of her training to this day. For example, she mentioned that she learns coloratura passages in works she’s performing by imagining how she would finger them on the cello!

We talked about how important it is for children to have musical experiences, the earlier, the better. Kehar grew up in Saratoga Springs, New York, which had great music programs in the schools. Her high school program was particularly good and offered AP music theory, which she took.

She also participated in a music theater program at Carnegie Mellon University that helped her to choose the classical, rather than the music theater, direction. After that, she pursued a music degree at University of Maryland – College Park. Kehar mentioned that college study encourages students to narrow their focus, a directive she followed at the start of her professional career. After graduation, Kehar lived and worked in Washington, DC for 6 years. For her, this was a period of oratorio and choral work.

For the past 8 years, Kehar has lived in Santa Fe. She originally came here to work for a yoga organization, and she took a break from singing for several of those years. As a more experienced professional, Kehar has returned to singing with the desire to broaden the scope of her musical activities. Among her new areas of interest and activity are recital work, opera, musical theater, and “fusion” projects that incorporate world music and other genres.

As far as opera is concerned, she said that being a lyric coloratura mezzo dictates the choices open to her. Her voice is perfectly suited to baroque, Mozart, French repertoire, and Rossini. Nineteenth-century art song also suits her, but she will probably not venture into Verdi, Puccini, or Wagner. There are also 20th-century operas that work well for her voice.

Kehar feels that the New Mexico music environment is a good one for artists like herself, who want to perform in a variety of settings and to explore new directions. She is a part-time, professional singer, and hopes to build her career to nearly full-time, freelance work.

She mentioned that many musicians have to supplement their income with “something else.” For her, this includes web development and marketing. She began to garner experience immediately after college, when she worked for a publisher. This got her into the digital realm, and today she is able to help nonprofits and other small businesses with their web development and marketing plans.

Kehar’s professional goals thus include looking into more singing opportunities and expanding her client base. Ideally, she’d like to work with more music nonprofits, especially since she has special expertise in this area.

The coronavirus is forcing many people, including Kehar, to “get clearer on life and actualizing that.” Currently, all of her work has been canceled for March and April, and she has 4 concerts schedule for May 2020. These include the Santa Fe Symphony, Santa Fe Pro Musica, Polyphony, and NMPAS. She has no idea whether any of them will happen.

Kehar also has a church job, as do many of our vocalists in the New Mexico Bach Chorale. Now that churches are not holding services, some are moving to online worship. She works with NMPAS artist and pianist Debbie Wagner at Santa Fe’s Christian Science Church. They initially shut down, but are starting video hookup for services. She’ll have her first streaming experience this coming Sunday, March 29th.

If you would like to support the work of Kehar Koslowsky during the COVID-19 emergency, please make a donation via the DONATE button on the NMPAS website or by mailing your donation to our PO Box:

New Mexico Performing Arts Society
3201 Zafarano Dr, Suite C #236,
Santa Fe, NM 87507

If you mail us a donation, please include a note, asking us to use the funds for the NMPAS Artist Relief Fund. In that case, your donation will to go directly to our musicians during the coronavirus emergency.

To our artists and audience members: please be safe and stay healthy!

Kehar Koslowsky, fourth from left, at the NMPAS 2019 Winter Solstice Concert in Santa Fe (Nov 30, 2019)

Jamie Bernstein On Growing Up in Her Father’s Shadow

by Linda Marianiello

On Sunday, August 4, at 11 a.m., Jamie Bernstein will read from her memoir, Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein, about her life as the daughter of the famous composer, conductor, and activist Leonard Bernstein. The event at Collected Works Bookstore is sponsored by Journey Santa Fe.

Jamie Bernstein spent most of her life waiting to write her memoir, which is about living in her father’s shadow. A book agent finally convinced her that the centennial of her father’s birth was the perfect time to publish her book, and she wrote the first draft that same day!

Another reason she wrote the memoir was to “control the narrative.” Leonard Bernstein’s children wanted to tell it “in the true way they saw it.” Jamie gave her brother, Alexander, and sister, Nina, veto power over everything she wrote in the book. They read every draft, and neither asked her to leave anything out.

It took ages for Jamie to figure out who she is, independently of her father. As early as second grade, a classmate identified her as “famous father girl.” She was fifty before she found “another way to be in the world of music.” And the right path turned out to be concert narration, which she came to quite by accident.

The catalyst was The Bernstein Beat, a program featuring Bernstein’s own music and based on his legendary Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic. Jamie’s artistic partner is the conductor Michael Barrett, a close associate of Leonard Bernstein. They did a test run with the Utah Symphony. Then, Carnegie Hall invited them to do the program. Other concerts about Mozart and Aaron Copland followed. They developed a large repertoire of programs, not all of them about her father. And she suddenly realized, “This is my career. Who knew?”

So why didn’t Jamie become a professional musician? When she moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a singer/songwriter, she noticed that her father’s renown closed more doors than it opened. Record executives said her music sounded “too Broadway.” She was writing eclectic music; her father’s own works were similarly wide-ranging. Record companies wanted a hit song, a template that would guarantee future sales. Ultimately, it didn’t work out.

And there was something else: Jamie’s mother, Felicia Cohn Montealegre, discouraged the siblings from drawing attention to themselves. This probably affected her decision to abandon a performing career and definitely caused her to avoid the limelight. She was “always in knots” about being the center of attention. The image she used to describe this in the book is “one foot on the gas pedal and one on the brake simultaneously.”

Today Jamie identifies as a “fan of music.” In fact, she’s been thinking about this a lot lately. She has many musician friends, whose work spans a wide range of genres from jazz and Latin to chamber music, as well as opera and orchestral works. “Musicians can’t get very far without an audience,” she points out. Audience members are not passive receptors. Musicians need them every bit as much as the other way round. Jamie is glad to embrace the role of audience member by “being there with open ears and heart.”

Leonard Bernstein’s legacy in the life of his children is complex, but his role as a teacher was pervasive. Their dad was the consummate teacher. He was always grabbing people’s attention and saying, “Listen to this!” Whether rehearsing an orchestra, telling a good Jewish joke, or engaging in some other activity, the same sensibility was at play. He used to say, “When I learn, I teach, and when I teach, I learn.” So, it is not surprising that all three children became teachers. They love nothing more than to share their passion for learning. The youngest, Nina, teaches about food. Alexander became an educator. And Jamie, the oldest of the three, teaches through concert narration.

The picture would not be complete without Leonard’s activism. In the 60s and 70s, people were afraid to talk about politics, especially when Richard Nixon was president. But Leonard and his wife, Felicia, were committed to making the world a better place and spoke out when they perceived an injustice. The children grew up with that whole sensibility, which is part of who they are today.

The siblings are devoted to keeping their dad’s legacy alive. The centennial provided an unrepeatable opportunity to introduce young people to his life and music. While many young people have not heard of Leonard Bernstein, they are usually familiar with West Side Story. And now a movie remake of West Side Story, directed by Steven Spielberg, is in production. It features a young cast, the Sharks are Latinos, and the script has been revised by Tony Kushner.

In her memoir, Jamie Bernstein speaks openly about her dad’s identity as a gay man. After Leonard Bernstein separated from his wife, he had a very hard time being an openly gay man. This was also due to the fact that Leonard’s mother was still alive, and he was concerned about how this would affect her. So another important reason for writing the memoir was to finally talk about the things that no one could talk about then, her dad’s sexual identity being one of them. Her mother’s breast cancer was another. There was a “paralysis around calling things what they were,” Jamie said.

Jamie feels that we’d made enormous progress around the issue of homosexuality in recent decades. Once gay marriage passed, she thought that most Americans viewed gay people as normal. She believes we’re in the midst of a backlash against gay rights, and it’s as hard to talk about difficult topics today as it was in the 60s and 70s.

When asked about the future of classical music, Jamie referenced her father’s passion for teaching and social justice. Her optimism is fueled by personal experience with El Sistema. Founded in 1975 in Venezuela, El Sistema is a national system of youth orchestras and choirs that lifts children out of poverty and gives them tools for life. The concerts she heard in Venezuela were some of the best she has ever attended. “It was like going to a ball game,” she said.

El Sistema has inspired hundreds of similar programs worldwide. Jamie believes it may take 15 or 20 years to see the change here in the US. If even 1% of the children currently in an El Sistema program pursue a professional career, they will bring their entire community with them. And these communities are a brand new demographic for classical music.

Jamie Bernstein is also a featured author for the 2019 JCC Book Fest at the Jewish Community Center in Albuquerque at 3 pm on Sunday, October 20, 2019. Tickets ($10 in advance, $12 at the door) for the event are available through Hold My Ticket: www.holdmyticket.com.

Event Details:

Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein with Jamie Bernstein

11 a.m. Sunday, August 4

Collected Works Bookstore, 202 Galisteo St

Free and open to the public, https://www.journeysantafe.com

Dear Friends of NMPAS!

I wanted to post a link to this article because it addresses something that all of us who love live music think about frequently: What is the future of the performing arts?

In “Curtains: The Future of the Arts in America,” Michael Kaiser, former Director of the Kennedy Center, says a few things that I’d like to emphasize. This material comes from an article by Jordan Levin of the Miami Herald. The link to the complete Miami Herald article by Jordan Levin is posted at the bottom of this excerpted text:

“His method, based on building an engaged and happy ‘family’ of board members, donors, audiences and community through a combination of creative, high quality programming and intense marketing and outreach, has become a kind of standard operating system for the arts.”

“If I’m a local theater or ballet or opera company and I’m going to compete with this online presence [which is previously defined in the article] then I had better be doing work that’s really interesting and special and has something really unique,” he [Kaiser] says. “Or I will be viewed as a poor, expensive competitor to what I can get online.”

The solutions Kaiser offers largely come from his DeVos [Institute] toolkit; doing high quality, innovative programming, with a laser focus on building your community and brand.”

And, finally, he says that it’s not the argument that the arts are good for society that will win people over: “But good performances do. Excitement, word of mouth, people going ‘wow,’ that’s something to see.”

The Mission and Vision of New Mexico Performing Arts Society, as well as audience, artist and community responses to our programs, very much resonate with Michael Kaiser’s vision for the future of arts organizations like ours.

There is lots of new information about the 2017-2018 NMPAS season on our new website. We invite you to visit us at: www.nmpas.org

Warm regards,

Linda Marianiello

Link to the complete article: www.miamiherald.com/opinion/issues-ideas/article17415302.html