iSING! Festival Singers Celebrate Chinese New Year on Shelter Island

The Shelter Island Friends of Music will open its nine-concert 2025 season on Sunday, February 16, at 3 p.m. with a Chinese New Year concert celebrating opera and song East and West. Internationally acclaimed bass, Hao Jiang Tian and six iSING! Festival singers will perform a repertoire of Western arias and songs, Chinese folksongs and art songs, including an ancient Tang poem, a Jewish folksong and more.

A 20-year veteran of the Metropolitan Opera, Tian has sung over 1,400 performances of 50 operatic roles worldwide. Since 2011 he has been the artistic director of iSING! Festival, founded by the Asian Performing Arts Council (APAC), a U.S. nonprofit fostering cultural exchange between U.S. and Asia. So far, nearly 400 iSING! artists from over 30 countries have performed in more than 50 major concerts, most recently, in January with the Philadelphia Orchestra. In an intensive program in China, all singers learn Mandarin as a lyrical language and are coached in Western operatic repertoire and performance by experts from leading conservatories and opera houses throughout the world. Many have gone on to careers in major opera houses.

The Shelter Island Friends of Music concert marks the first time Tian and iSING! have presented their unique programming in such an intimate setting.

“I’m ecstatic to get them here,” says SIFM board president Lois B. Morris, who co-authored Tian’s 2008 picaresque memoir “Along the Roaring River: My Wild Ride From Mao to the Met.

“We had scheduled Tian and two singers originally to launch our 2020 season,” she continued, noting that the COVID-19 pandemic derailed that schedule. “It broke my heart to have to cancel them.”

But in the intervening five years, both SIFM — which has doubled its concert offerings — and iSING! — have evolved remarkably. During the pandemic, when training and performances were canceled, Tian sponsored an international iSING! composition competition to set to music 1,300-year old poems of the Tang dynasty, considered the golden age of Chinese poetry and art. In its 2023 U.S. premiere, iSING! Festival and the Philadelphia Orchestra performed 14 of the winning pieces — all sung in Mandarin — at the Kimmel Center and Lincoln Center. And just last month, a newly co-commissioned Tang poem by the Grammy-winning composer Mason Bates, sung by iSING!, premiered in Philadelphia. The Shelter Island audience will be treated to one of these “Echoes of Ancient Tang Poems.”

The concert is Sunday, February 16, at 3 p.m. at Shelter Island Presbyterian Church, 32 North Ferry Road (Rte. 114), Shelter Island. Admission is free; donations are appreciated. A reception with the artists will follow the concert, featuring Chinese dumplings made by Martha Liao, iSING! general director, APAC’s founder, former geneticist, and Tian’s wife. shelterislandfriendsofmusic.org.