Reflections: A World-Premiere Performance

Trevor Weston’s music has been called a “gently syncopated marriage of intellect and feeling.” Weston’s honors include the George Ladd Prix de Paris from the University of California, Berkeley, an Arts and Letters Award in Music and a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and residencies from MacDowell and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Weston’s work, Juba for Strings, won the Sonori/New Orleans Chamber Orchestra Composition competition.

Weston won the first Emerging Black Composers Project. The award commissioned Push, premiered by the San Francisco Symphony under the direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen. The Boston Globe described Weston’s choral music as having a “knack for piquant harmonies, evocative textures, and effective vocal writing.” Weston’s music has been performed by; The Bang on a Can All-Stars, New York Philharmonic, Chanticleer, Roomful of Teeth, Boston Landmarks Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, Washington Bach Consort, and Harvard Choirs.

Dr. Weston is Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department at Drew University and an instructor for the Music Advancement Program and Pre-College at The Juilliard School.

Rebecca Cypess is a historical keyboardist, musicologist, and academic administrator currently serving as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Dean of the Undergraduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yeshiva University. She is the founder and director of the Raritan Players, which explore little-known repertoire and performances practices of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries based on new musicological research. The group’s programs and recordings include In Sara Levy’s Salon, In the Salon of Madame Brillon, Sisters, Face to Face: The Bach Legacy in Women’s Hands, and, most recently, Ignatius Sancho: Music of an Eighteenth-Century Black Englishman. The Raritan Players have garnered praise as “simply mesmerizing” (Early Music America), “enchanting” (Classics Today), and “an unexpected treasure” (American Record Guide). Cypress has received the Noah Greenberg Award for contributions to historical performance and the Ruth A. Solie Award for a collection of musicological essays of exceptional merit, both from the American Musicological Society.

Soprano Sonya Headlam performs repertoire ranging from early music to newly composed works across opera, oratorio, art song, and chamber music. She appears frequently as a soloist in large-scale sacred and symphonic works with major orchestras, and collaborates regularly with Apollo’s Fire and Trinity Choir, the GRAMMY-nominated New York City-based professional ensemble.

A committed interpreter of contemporary music, her recent highlights include works such as Julia Wolfe’s Steel Hammer, Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, Ellen Reid’s dreams of the new world, and Tyshawn Sorey’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), among others.

She has also engaged deeply with the music of Ignatius Sancho, the 18th-century Black British composer, writer, and abolitionist. She is the featured soprano on the 2025 Centaur recording Ignatius Sancho: Music of an 18th-Century Black Englishman with Raritan Players. Additional recordings include In the Salon of Madame Brillon (Acis, 2023) and a forthcoming recording of Trevor Weston’s Reflections.