AMY BURTON,
soprano
With a versatile voice for a career in opera, con-
cert, and cabaret, soprano Amy Burton has sung
at the White House and with the Metropolitan
Opera, New York City Opera, Zurich Opera,
Scottish Opera, the Wexford Festival, New Ja-
pan Philharmonic, Israel Philharmonic, Scottish
Chamber Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony,
Cleveland Orchestra, and Philharmonia Ba-
roque Orchestra, among many other compa-
nies and ensembles. She has special affinities for
20th- and 21st-century music, having premiered
music by John Musto, Paul Moravec, Lee Hoiby,
John Harbison, and Richard Danielpour, as well
as French vocal music of the 1920s and ’30s. Bur-
ton’s critically acclaimed album with Musto and
Yves Abel,
Souvenir de Printemps
, was recorded
from a one-woman show based on the life of
French singer Yvonne Printemps. She has re-
corded for the Naxos, Harbinger, Albany, Angel,
Opera America, and CRI labels, and her recent
albums include
Songs of John Musto
and
Got a
Little Rhythm
, both on the Bridge label, featur-
ing Musto on piano and baritone Patrick Ma-
son. Burton has performed numerous recitals
and cabaret shows with Musto at such venues as
Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, New York’s
Café Sabarsky, the National Arts Club, Joe’s Pub,
the Washington Museum for Women in the
Arts, Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu, and the
Glimmerglass Festival. A highlight among her
theater credits is performing in the modern-day
premiere of Cole Porter’s rediscovered 1928 mu-
sical
The Ambassador Revue
at the Town Hall
in New York (2014) and in Paris (2012). Burton
has earned top awards from the Gerda Lissner,
George London, and Sullivan Foundations, as
well as the silver medal of the Marian Ander-
son International Vocal Competition, and today,
as a faculty member of the Mannes College of
Music and the CUNY Graduate Center DMA
program, she prepares vocal students to earn
those same honors and more. She also teaches,
coaches, and directs at the Colburn Conserva-
tory and has taught French vocal repertoire at
the Manhattan School of Music. Amy Burton is
making her Ravinia debut.
MICHAEL BORISKIN,
piano
A native of New York steeped in the musical and
visual arts from a young age, Michael Boriskin
pursued musical studies at Queens College and
Juilliard and is today a versatile and well-trav-
eled pianist as well as the artistic and executive
director of Copland House. He has a wide-rang-
ing association with the New York Philhar-
monic, consulting on its Completely Copland
Festival and appearing as a pre-concert lecturer,
moderator, chamber music collaborator, and
piano soloist. Boriskin has also been an artis-
tic advisor for programs and projects at Carn-
egie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Tisch Center for
the Arts, Columbia University’s Miller Theatre,
New Line Cinema, and the Arnold Schoenberg
Institute, as well as the music director for three
seasons of the White Oak Dance Project. He has
performed throughout the United States and
over 30 other countries, including with such or-
chestras as the San Francisco, Seattle, and Utah
Symphonies, New York Chamber Symphony,
Polish National and Munich Radio Orchestras,
American Composers Orchestra, and Buffalo
Philharmonic. His credits also include appear-
ances at the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall,
Lincoln Center’s Great Performances series,
Theatre des Champs-Elysées, Vienna’s Arnold
Schoenberg Center, the Athens Festival of Mu-
sic and Dance, Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires,
the Library of Congress, and the Istanbul In-
ternational Festival. Boriskin is a familiar figure
on National Public Radio and American Public
Media as a performer, commentator, and host
on such programs as
Performance Today
,
Stu-
dio 360
, and
Marketplace
. His own broadcast
series,
Centuryview
, celebrating piano works
of the past 100 years, ran for three seasons on
NPR. With a repertoire spanning from Baroque
masters to scores of contemporary American
composers, he has also been heard with such
chamber ensembles as the Borromeo, St. Pe-
tersburg, St. Lawrence, Penderecki, Ludwig,
and Lark String Quartets, as well as the Dorian
and Arioso Wind Quintets. Boriskin has an ex-
pansive discography across the Conifer, New
World, Koch, Albany, and Sony Classical labels,
including concertos by Gershwin, Tchaikovsky,
Prokofiev, and George Perle. Michael Boriskin is
making his Ravinia debut.
JOHN MUSTO,
piano
Composer and pianist John Musto is that rare
musician who is comfortable in virtually any
genre or concert stage, from orchestral, concer-
to, and opera to solo, vocal, and chamber mu-
sic to scores for film and television. His music
embraces many strains of contemporary Amer-
ican concert music, enriched especially by jazz,
ragtime, and the blues. He especially invests this
quality into his vocal music, which ranges from
a series of operas—
Volpone
,
Later the Same Eve-
ning
,
Bastianello
, and
The Inspector
—to a deep
catalogue of classic songs. Musto was a Pulitzer
Prize finalist for his orchestral song cycle
Dove
Sta Amore
, and he is a recipient of two Emmy
Awards, two CINE Awards, a Rockefeller Fel-
lowship, and an American Academy of Arts and
Letters Award. As a pianist, he commands a rep-
ertoire from Galuppi sonatas to Bolcom études,
from Bach concertos to Bernstein’s Symphony
No. 2 (“The Age of Anxiety”) and his own con-
certos, and from Schubert lieder to the Great
American Songbook, often performing with
his wife, soprano Amy Burton, in recital and
cabaret. Musto’s work has been recorded by the
Bridge, Harmonia Mundi, Nonesuch, Cedille,
Naxos, Harbinger, CRI, EMI, Hyperion, Mu-
sicMasters, Innova, Channel Classics, Albany,
and New World Records labels. Named a dis-
tinguished alumnus of the Manhattan School of
Music, he is currently coordinator of the DMA
in Music Performance program at the CUNY
Graduate Center. John Musto is making his Ra-
vinia debut.
RAVINIA MAGAZINE | JULY 23 – JULY 29, 2018
118