Lori Laitman
1955 -Laitman's oeuvre of nearly 200 art songs spans the breadth of American literature, from Emily Dickinson to contemporary poets. Her songs are widely performed, and she has received countless commissions to write vocal music, especially song cycles, for which she is particularly talented.
Photo: Lori Laitman, photo by Devon Cass, www.artsongs.com
About
Laitman, a native of New York, graduated from Yale with a focus on composition for theatre and film. However, she began writing almost solely for voice in 1991. Her first opera Come To Me In Dreams was premiered by Cleveland Opera in 2005, and her opera The Scarlet Letter was commissioned and premiered at the University of Central Arkansas in 2008.
Her songs set not only the poetry of American composers (including Sara Teasdale, William Carlos Williams, Mary Oliver, Richard Wilbur, Kenneth Rexroth, and Dana Gioia), but also the words of Holocaust victims/survivors, of Charles Baudelaire, and of poets from the Czech Republic, Ireland, England, Sri Lanka, Russia, and Poland.
--Christie Finn
