TONY ARNOLD, 2024-25 ARTISTIC PARTNER

Soprano Tony Arnold joins Collage New Music as its inaugural Artistic Partner, for the 2024-25 season. With this partnership she will perform three concerts with Collage across the season, including a vocal recital presented by Collage, featuring Eric Nathan’s song cycle Some Favored Nook and music by Bernard Rands and Hildegard von Bingen (November 3, 2024). She presents a world premiere by Michael Gandolfi (May 4, 2025) and music by Kareem Roustom and Jörg Widmann (March 2, 2025).

“Soprano Tony Arnold is a luminary in the world of chamber music and art song.  Today’s classical composers are inspired by her inherently beautiful voice, consummate musicianship, and embracing spirit” (Huffington Post).  Hailed by the New York Times as “a bold, powerful interpreter,” she is internationally acclaimed as a leading proponent of contemporary music in concert and recording, having premiered hundreds of works by established and emerging composers.  Since becoming the first-prize laureate of both the 2001 Gaudeamus International Competition (NL) and the 2001 Louise D. McMahon Competition (USA), Tony Arnold has collaborated with the most cutting-edge composers and instrumentalists on the world stage, and shares with audiences her “broader gift for conveying the poetry and nuance behind outwardly daunting contemporary scores” (Boston Globe).  Her unique blend of vocal virtuosity and communicative warmth, combined with wide-ranging skills in education and leadership were recognized with the 2015 Brandeis Creative Arts Award, given in appreciation of “excellence in the arts and the lives and works of distinguished, active American artists.”

As the soprano of the intrepid International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Tony Arnold is a catalyst for dozens of groundbreaking projects, the most recent of which is David Lang’s Whisper Opera in ICE’s touring production directed by Jim Findlay.  She has toured the U.S. extensively as a member of the George Crumb Ensemble, and has become the voice most associated with Crumb’s music since the beloved Jan DeGaetani.  A noted guest artist at international festivals on four continents, Tony Arnold has been featured at the Darmstadt Festival and Witten New Music Days (Germany); Time of Music (Finland); Cervantino (Mexico); Musica Sacra Maastricht (Netherlands); Tongyeong Festival (Korea); Perspectives XXI Festival (Armenia), and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.  She regularly appears with leading ensembles including the JACK Quartet, Orion Quartet, Ensemble Modern, Talea Ensemble, Chicago Symphony Orchestra Music Now, Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

With more than thirty discs to her credit, Tony Arnold has recorded a broad segment of the modern vocal repertory with esteemed chamber music colleagues.  Her recording of George Crumb’s iconic Ancient Voices of Children (Bridge) was nominated for a 2006 Grammy Award, and her recording with ICE of Nathan Davis’s On the Nature of Thingness (Starkland) was named Best Contemporary Classical Album at the 2016 Independent Music Awards.  Other notable releases include György Kurtág’s monumental Kafka Fragments (Bridge); Jason Eckardt’s uncompromising Undersong (Mode) and Tongues (Tzadik); Olivier Messiaen’s mystical Harawi (New Focus); and the complete Webern project under the direction of Robert Craft (Naxos).  Of the Webern, The Guardianwrites, “sung with remarkable poise and warmth by soprano Tony Arnold…each [song] is a perfectly etched miniature, a nugget of impacted lyricism, and Arnold unwraps them with immense care.”