Artistic Team

Kathy Schuman joined Caramoor in the newly-created role of Vice President, Artistic Programming & Executive Producer in November 2016. Previously she was Artistic Administrator of Carnegie Hall, where she helped program its three venues in a wide variety of musical genres. During her 15-year tenure at Carnegie, she was deeply involved in the opening of Zankel Hall in 2003, which led to an expansion of the hall’s presentations to include significantly more new music, early music, jazz, world, and folk. As the primary coordinator of Carnegie’s robust commissioning program, she oversaw approximately 200 commissions, including new works by David Lang, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, Brad Mehldau, Nico Muhly, Missy Mazzoli, Meredith Monk, and many others. Directly prior to joining Caramoor, she was Vice President and Artistic Director of G. Schirmer/AMP, managing a roster of Pulitzer, Grammy, Oscar, Tony and Emmy-winning composers.

Kathy began her career in arts management at Frank Salomon Associates, where she worked both as an artist manager and as Coordinator of the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont. She moved to Europe in 1994, where she was the Managing Director of the European Chamber Music Association (Bremen), Administrator of the Contemporary Music Network at the Arts Council of England, and then Associate Director of Intermusica Artist Management (London), where she managed artists and programmed the International Chamber Music Season at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, in addition to other concert presentations throughout London.

A native New Yorker, Kathy has been a lifelong choral singer, with a love of music instilled at an early age from her father, a professional oboist, and her mother, a book designer and opera-lover. She’s also a gourmet home cook, avid world traveler, weekend cyclist, cinephile, and theater enthusiast.

Caramoor is proud of our collaboration with Jazz at Lincoln Center, led by Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis. Jazz at Lincoln Center programming provides audiences the chance to hear world-class jazz from one of the nation’s foremost cultural institutions in Caramoor’s idyllic setting year-round.

The mission of Jazz at Lincoln Center is to entertain, enrich and expand a global community for Jazz through performance, education, and advocacy. We believe Jazz is a metaphor for Democracy. Because jazz is improvisational, it celebrates personal freedom and encourages individual expression. Because jazz is swinging, it dedicates that freedom to finding and maintaining common ground with others. Because jazz is rooted in the blues, it inspires us to face adversity with persistent optimism.

Orchestra of St. Luke’s (OSL), Caramoor’s orchestra-in-residence, began in 1974 as a group of virtuoso musicians performing chamber music concerts at Greenwich Village’s Church of St. Luke in the Fields. Now in its 43rd season, the Orchestra performs diverse musical genres at New York’s major concert venues, and has collaborated with artists ranging from Renée Fleming and Joshua Bell to Bono and Metallica. In the fall of 2018, internationally celebrated expert in 18th-Century music, Bernard Labadie, will join the Orchestra as Principal Conductor, continuing the Orchestra’s long tradition of working with proponents of historical performance practice.

OSL’s signature programming includes a subscription series presented by Carnegie Hall, now in its 31st season; an annual multi-week collaboration with Paul Taylor American Modern Dance at Lincoln Center; an annual summer residency at Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts; and a chamber music festival featuring appearances at The Morgan Library & Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and Merkin Concert Hall at Kaufman Music Center. The Orchestra has participated in 118 recordings, four of which have won Grammy Awards, has commissioned more than 50 new works, and has given more than 175 world, U.S., and New York City premieres.

Nearly half of OSL’s performances each year are presented free of charge through its education and community programs, reaching over 10,000 New York City public school students. Additionally, OSL provides free instrumental coaching and presents student performances through its Youth Orchestra of St. Luke’s and its Mentorship Program for Pre-Professional Musicians.

OSL built and operates The DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City’s only rehearsal, recording, education, and performance space expressly dedicated to classical music. The DiMenna Center serves more than 500 ensembles and more than 30,000 musicians each year.

Visit OSLmusic.org and find @OSLmusic on Instagram, Facebook, Spotify, and elsewhere.

Chicago-based sound artist Stephan Moore is currently the curator of sound art at the Caramoor Center for Music and Arts in New York. As a performer, organizer, and maker, he has been working at the forefront of the experimental audio world for the past 20 years. His work as a sound installation artist, composer, and theatrical sound designer has been recognized with numerous awards, grants, and artist residencies. His recent solo exhibitions have exhibited at diverse venues, including Experimental Sound Studios in Chicago, the Church of the Ascension in New York City, and Raygun Projects in Queensland, Australia. He has designed over 20 dance and theater productions in New York City, including the “Bessie” award-winning Dark Horse/Black Forest, and the “Bessie” nominated The People To Come, both with the performance collective A Canary Torsi. Evidence, the band he formed with Scott Smallwood in 2001, has performed extensively across 5 continents and has released a dozen recordings.

Stephan Moore received his MFA in 2003 from the Integrated Electronic Arts program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he studied with Pauline Oliveros and Curtis Bahn. From 2004 to 2010 he was the touring sound engineer and music supervisor for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Moore formed the company Isobel Audio LLC in 2012 to promote and distribute Hemisphere Speakers, an omnidirectional loudspeaker used in sound installations and electronic music performances. After completing his Ph.D. in Computer Music and Multimedia Composition at Brown University in 2015, Moore joined the faculty of Northwestern University, where he currently teaches courses in sound art and sound design.

Steven Blier is the Artistic Director of the New York Festival of Song (NYFOS), which he co-founded in 1988 with Michael Barrett. Since the Festival’s inception, Mr. Blier has programmed, performed, translated and annotated more than 130 vocal recitals with repertoire spanning the entire range of American song, art song from Schubert to Szymanowski, and popular song from early vaudeville to Lennon-McCartney. NYFOS has also made in-depth explorations of music from Spain, Latin America, Scandinavia and Russia. New York Magazine gave NYFOS an award for Best Classical Programming, while Opera News proclaimed Blier “the coolest dude in town.” Currently the Artistic Director of Caramoor’s newest mentoring program, the Schwab Vocal Rising Stars, Mr. Blier has been with the program as a Distinguished Artist pianist and vocal coach, since the inaugural concert in 2009.

Mr. Blier enjoys an eminent career as an accompanist and vocal coach. His recital partners have included Renée Fleming, Cecilia Bartoli, Samuel Ramey, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Susan Graham, Jessye Norman, and José van Dam, in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to La Scala. He is also on the faculty of The Juilliard School and has been active in encouraging young recitalists at summer programs, including the Wolf Trap Opera Company, Santa Fe Opera, and the San Francisco Opera Center. Many of his former students, including Stephanie Blythe, Joseph Kaiser, Sasha Cooke, Paul Appleby, Dina Kuznetsova, and Kate Lindsey, have gone on to be valued recital colleagues and sought-after stars on the opera and concert stage.

In keeping the traditions of American music alive, Steven Blier has brought back to the stage many of the rarely heard songs of George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Kurt Weill and Cole Porter. He has also played ragtime, blues and stride piano evenings with John Musto. A champion of American art song, he has premiered works of John Corigliano, Paul Moravec, Ned Rorem, William Bolcom, John Musto, Richard Danielpour, Tobias Picker, Robert Beaser, Lowell Liebermann, Harold Meltzer, and Lee Hoiby, many of which were commissioned by NYFOS.

Mr. Blier’s extensive discography includes the premiere recording of Leonard Bernstein’s Arias and Barcarolles (Koch International), which won a Grammy® Award. His most recent releases are Spanish Love Songs (Bridge Records), recorded live at the Caramoor International Music Festival with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Joseph Kaiser, and Michael Barrett; the world premiere recording of Bastianello (John Musto) and Lucrezia (William Bolcom), a double bill of one-act comic operas set to librettos by Mark Campbell; and his latest recording, Quiet Please, an album of jazz standards with vocalist Darius de Haas.

Pamela Frank has established an outstanding international reputation across an unusually varied range of performing activity. As a soloist she has performed with leading orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the Berlin Philharmonic and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. Pamela performed regularly with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, recording the complete Mozart Violin Concertos with them and David Zinman and has also recorded a Schubert album and the Beethoven sonata cycle, both with her father Claude Frank.

Pamela is a sought-after chamber musician and has performed at many international festivals including Aldeburgh, Verbier, Edinburgh, Salzburg, Tanglewood, Marlboro, and Ravinia. Aside from her devotion to works of the standard repertory, Pamela has performed and recorded a number of contemporary works. Her accomplishments were recognized in 1999 with the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize. Pamela is professor of violin at the Curtis Institute of Music and teaches and coaches annually at the Tanglewood, Ravinia, and Verbier Festivals. Since 2008 she has been the Artistic Director of the Evnin Rising Stars, a mentoring program for young artists at Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts. Her newest venture is the formation of Fit as a Fiddle Inc., a collaboration with physical therapist Howard Nelson in which they use both their expertise for injury prevention and treatment of musicians.