Bard Conservatory of Music News Archive

Bard College Conservatory of Music is pleased to announce that baritone Tyler Duncan will join its faculty in the Graduate Vocal Arts program. Duncan, whose voice faculty appointment will begin in fall 2025, has performed worldwide to great acclaim in both opera and concert repertoire, and with several of the world’s leading orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Tafelmusik, Minnesota Orchestra, and the Kansas City Symphony. He has performed numerous roles at The Metropolitan Opera, including Fiorello in Il barbiere di Siviglia, Moralès in Carmen, Prince Yamadori in Madama Butterfly, and the Journalist in Lulu. Other notable appearances have included Mr. Friendly in the 18th-century ballad opera Flora and Sprecher in Die Zauberflöte at the Spoleto Festival USA, Raymondo in Handel’s Almira, Dandini in La Cenerentola with Pacific Opera Victoria and Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Princeton Festival. Duncan has also been the recipient of prizes from the Naumburg, London’s Wigmore Hall, and Munich’s ARD competitions, and has won the Joy in Singing competition, the New York Oratorio Society’s Lyndon Woodside Oratorio-Solo Competition, the Prix International Pro Musicis Award, and the Bernard Diamant Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts. 

A New Day, a cello concerto released in 2021 by Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts at Bard College, was featured in Times Union. The work, which began as a commission by the Colorado Music Festival, Cleveland Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra, was written while Jeff Litfin, her late husband of 50 years, was dying. “I was in real bad shape,” Tower said. “So I decided to write. In fact, all the music I've been writing since then is about him.” The concerto, which will be performed by Albany Symphony in Troy on November 16 and 17, contains four movements: “Daybreak,” “Working Out,” “Mostly Alone” and “Into the Night.” The titles are intentionally simple, allowing for many interpretations of a single day, she told Times Union.