Opera UCLA participates in the Leonard Bernstein Centennial year with an evening dedicated to his theater music plus his late masterpiece SONGFEST, a collection of twelve beautiful settings of American poets. Scott Dunn will conduct the two piano version arranged by John Musto, and Victoria Kirsch will preside over the theater songs.

SONGFEST was composed for the American bicentennial in 1976, and it remains a beautiful panorama of American viewpoints since the founding of our nation. In the words of Jack Gottlieb, whose notes on the work are available on the Bernstein website, "(t)he composer has envisioned this picture through the words of 13 po­ets embracing 300 years of the country's history. The subject matter of their poetry is the American artist's experience as it relates to his or her crea­tivity, loves, marriages, or minority problems (blacks, women, homosexuals, expatriates) within a fundamentally Puritan society." The songs themselves are beautiful, witty, and moving. The students of Opera UCLA will bring the entire event thrillingly to life.