PROGRAM
Sensual America is a concert-portrait of desire and repression, built for baritone and piano and conveyed exclusively through the words of Walt Whitman. Staged as a fluid weave of classical song and spoken word, Sensual America explores the sacredness of desire, longing, and human connection through the lens of one of our greatest poets and thinkers.
Come spend an afternoon celebrating life, love, and sensory experience with text by Walt Whitman and music by Leonard Bernstein, Frank Bridge, Jake Heggie, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Kurt Weill, Ned Rorem, Charles Ives, Lee Hoiby, George Crumb, Charles Naginski, Craig Urquhart, Elinor Remick Warren, and Harry Somers.
Jeremy Weiss - Baritone, Ari Livne - Piano
JEREMY’S BIO
With a "heart-wrenchingly beautiful" voice (Interludes) possessing an "indigo-tinged sensuousness" (Opera News), baritone Jeremy Weiss brings human stories to life through radically open-hearted performances. A vocal chameleon and crossover artist, his operatic and musical theater roles range from Schaunard (La Bohème) and Steve Jobs (The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs) to Curly (Oklahoma!) and Garibaldo (Rodelinda).
His career spans two continents, featuring credits with L’Opéra National de Paris, Carnegie Hall, and the Ravinia Festival with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Recent highlights include house debuts at Seattle Opera, Portland Opera, and San Diego Opera in Fellow Travelers, alongside an upcoming debut with Austin Opera. Weiss is also an acclaimed maker of multidisciplinary work.
He co-created The Wandering, an immersive queer visual album based on Schubert’s lieder that headlined the Innovation in Art Song Summit. He also co-composed and wrote Infinitesimal, a genre-shattering chamber opera for voice, piano, and electronics blending memoir with the science of mortality, which premiered at National Sawdust in 2026 before touring internationally.
A prizewinner in the Lotte Lenya and Handel Aria competitions, Weiss earned his undergraduate degree at Yale University and holds a Master’s in Music and Performer Diploma from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music.
ARI’S BIO
Ari Livne is a classically trained pianist, actor, and versatile performer based in New York City, who loves to tell stories with and about music. Ari cares deeply about creating a warm, welcoming environment for audiences. Whether his concerts center around a single composer, a theme, or a moment in history, he always provides a unifying principle that the audience can settle into. Some performances delve deeply into the repertoire of a single composer: he performed the complete Rachmaninoff Etudes Tableaux in Elebash Hall and presented a lecture-recital on the Goldberg Variations at the Bridenthal Concert Series. Others focus on new music: he has premiered new works by the composer Cyrus Von Hochstetter and performed the American premiers of works by Peter Maxwell Davies and Volodymyr Runchak, the latter at the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival in 2020.
Ari is also an avid collaborator and chamber musician. He recently completed a second tour of Japan with violinist Sho Omagari, performing in nine cities and doing outreach concerts at more than twenty schools and hospitals. He has appeared twice with the Aurea Ensemble in Providence, RI. His duo with cellist Clare Monfredo has spent two summers at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute and performed interactive recitals in New York, NY; Ellsworth, ME; Hudson, NY; and Philadelphia, PA.
He also recently presented programs centered around Schoenberg’s Book of Hanging Gardens and Faure’s La chanson d’Ève with mezzo-soprano Sophie Delphis in Brooklyn, NY and Concord, NH. Ari holds degrees from Yale University and The Juilliard School. He has studied acting with John Anthony and Eric Tucker, singing with Kayla Green, and more recently discovered the joy of clown school with Christopher Bayes.
arilivne.com; @arilivne jeremyweissperformer.com, @jeremyweissperformer