Leonard Lehrman

Leonard Lehrman (b. 1949) (ASCAP, GEMA), former Critic-at-Large of The New Music Connoisseur, Associate Editor of Opera Monthly, Editor of Opera Today, and Assistant Chorus Master of the Metropolitan Opera, founded the Jewish Music Theater of Berlin and the Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus, and is the composer of 226 works to date, including 11 operas (4 based on works of Russian literature), 7 musicals, 79 individual instrumental pieces, 90 for chorus, and 255 for solo voice, as well as 64 translations (from French, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, and especially Russian – including the operas  Женитьба, Жизнь за царя, and Русалка) and 18 adaptations. He has degrees from Harvard College (B.A. cum laude 1971 in Music) where his teachers included Earl Kim and Leon Kirchner, Cornell University (M.F.A. 1975 & D.M.A. 1977 in Music Composition) where he studied with Robert Palmer and Karel Husa, and Long Island University (M.S. in Library Science, 1995), with additional course work in Fontainebleau, Paris, Salzburg, Ghent, and Indiana – where his teachers included Donald Erb, John Eaton, and Tibor Kozma.

He has taught at Cornell, Empire State College, and HUC-JIR in New York and worked privately with Elie Siegmeister, Nadia Boulanger, and Leonard Bernstein. Since 1995 he has been a Reference Librarian at Oyster Bay-East Norwich Public Library; since 2014 Music Director/Composer-in-Residence at Christ Lutheran Church in Rosedale, NY and High Holidays Music Director at the Metropolitan Synagogue in Manhattan. He was among the youngest delegates at the 1971 International Music Congress in Moscow and the oldest at the Moscow Youth Festival of 1985. He and his wife, soprano Helene Williams, have performed in 600 concerts on 4 continents, and 2,300 YouTube videos, watched by over 200,000 viewers. They made their Belarus debut in June 2016 at concerts in Minsk, Bobruisk and Vitebsk, leading up to the July recording sessions for this album in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Lehrman’s mother, Emily R. Lehrman (Mar. 1, 1923-Jan. 13, 2015), with whom he often collaborated, was a native Russian speaker, scholar (writing her 1947 Columbia M.A. thesis under Roman Jakobson on Pushkin in Soviet Criticism), teacher, and translator in her own right (for Solomon Mikhoels and Russian War Relief throughout New England in 1943; of Natalya Baranskaya’s Неделя как неделя, Massachusetts Review, 15:4, 1974; and Dmitri Nagishkin’s Folktales of the Amur, Abrams, 1980). This album is dedicated to her memory.

Lehrman’s association with Mandelbaum dates from the 1970s and the latter’s guest lecture on microtonality in a class led by William Austin at Cornell. In the 1980s, Lehrman programmed Mandelbaum’s music at Berlin’s Amerikahaus, and Mandelbaum programmed Lehrman’s music at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. In 1991-98, as the first President of The Long Island Composers Alliance, Lehrman brought Mandelbaum into the organization, leading to numerous collaborations in the NY area, including definitive performances of Lehrman’s Prelude: Bloody Kansas by an orchestra conducted by Mandelbaum, and of Mandelbaum’s Millay setting Love Is Not All by Helene Williams, accompanied by Lehrman.