(Credit: Rebecca Fay/Caramoor Festival)

The Caramoor Festival, held annually at Katonah, New York, has announced its 2020 season celebrating its 75th anniversary and featuring a wide array of international performances.

For the purposes of this article we will only highlight operatic and vocal performances.

The Trinity Baroque Orchestra and The Choir of Trinity Wall Street are joined by a cast of international soloists for a performance of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera “Dardanus,” written by Leclerc de La Bruère. The cast is led by Zachary Wilder and Melissa Attebury. Baroque specialist Avi Stein is set to conduct the production by by theater and film director John La Bouchardière.

Performance Date: June 28, 2020

A perennial summer favorite is Caramoor’s Independence Day celebration. This year Curt Ebersole and his 60-piece Westchester Symphonic Winds will perform their annual “Pops, Patriots, and Fireworks” concert. The concert will include a medley of Gershwin tunes with soprano Candice Hoyes and baritone Jorell Williams. The program also includes patriotic tunes, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, a special tribute to towering Harlem Renaissance pianist and composer Duke Ellington called An Ellington Portrait, and much more.

Performance Date: July 4, 2020

On Site Opera is set to present Paisiello and Petrosellini’s “Barber of Seville,” directed by General and Artistic Director Eric Einhorn and conducted by Music Director Geoffrey McDonald. Performing at the Spanish Courtyard and the Music Room of the Rosen House, the cast will include David Blalock, Jeni Houser, and Andrew Wilkowske.

Performance Dates: July 9-11, 2020

On July 25 a program entitled “Listening to Tom-Tom”  will center on the 1932 opera by Shirley Graham Du Bois, a noted playwright and activist for African-American and women’s rights causes as well as a composer. Soprano Candice Hoyes, baritone Markel Reed, and pianist Kyle Walker will perform excerpts from the opera, while a panel discussion considering its complex representations of race, gender, and history features Juilliard Professor of Ethnomusicology Fredara Hadley and Professor of Theater and Africana Studies Caroline Jackson Smith from Oberlin College.

Performance Date: July 25, 2020