Bas-Sheve
Original Score by Henekh Kon with Libretto by Moishe Broderzon
Orchestration and Additional Compositions by Joshua Horowitz
Additional Texts by Michael Wex
Used by arrangement with Joshua Horowitz
Projections by Yeva Lapsker

Hailed as a singer “with spirit and remarkable facility” (Opera News), American soprano Anna Davidson is a champion of contemporary classical music. A returning artist to UCLA’s Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience, she previously performed in Tod Machover’s Schoenberg in Hollywood.

She has performed works by Fabian Panisello, Jörg Widmann, Gordon Kampe, Peter Maxwell Davies, George Crumb, and Arnold Schönberg, and has appeared with Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, the Asturias Symphony Orchestra, Plural Ensemble, New World Symphony, and Lux Ensemble, as well as at the Tate Modern in London.

Her opera roles include Okichi (Die Judith von Shimoda), Martha (Le Malentendu), Dorinda (Orlando), Abigail Williams (The Crucible), the Queen of the Night (Die Zauberflöte), Hilda Mack (Elegy for Young Lovers), Le Rossignol and Le Feu (L’Enfant et les Sortilèges), and Anne Trulove (The Rake’s Progress). She is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and The Juilliard School.

Versatile tenor, Jon Lee Keenan, is a native of Las Vegas, Nevada.  Heavily influenced by his father, both a classical and jazz saxophonist, Jon cultivated an interest in performing a variety of music at an early age. After studying both classical voice and jazz studies at UNLV, Jon relocated to Southern California to pursue a career in singing.

In 2007, Jon was asked to join the LA Master Chorale; Highlights with LAMC include the role of “Evangelist” in St. Matthew Passion and Handel’s Messiah.  Jon has helped create many new exciting characters with the experimental opera producers at The Industry LA: “Clyde Barrow” in Bonnie and Clyde (Andrew McIntosh), and the “Captain“ in Sweet Land (Du Yun/ Raven Chacon) among many others. 

Other recent performances include A sunbeam’s Architecture with poetry by e.e. cummings and music by Elliot Carter and Albert Hoffman in Anne Lebaron’s LSD: The Opera.

Nmon Ford’s recent season appearances include the role of Scarpia Tosca at SOKA, Jonathan Leshnoff’s The Sacrifice of Isaac at Nashville Opera, the highly lauded Siddartha – She at Aspen Music Festival; Sharpless Madama Butterfly with Utah Opera and Symphony, Detroit Opera, Cincinnati Opera and Pittsburgh Opera; Silvio Pagliacci at Opera Carolina, and the critically acclaimed High Priest Samson et Dalilah at Opera Colorado.
Past highlights include Escamillo Carmen at Opera Colorado, English National Opera and Calgary Opera. A feature of past seasons includes his exceptionally reviewed performances as Crown in the new ENO/Metropolitan Opera production of Porgy and Bess at English National Opera; and he excelled in the title role Don Giovanni in the UK’s Dorset Opera Festival.
On the concert platform, Nmon Ford is renowned for performances of Bernstein’s Songfest which he sang with BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and with BBC Symphony at the Barbican Centre. At the Mostly Mozart Festival, he appeared as the Celebrant in Bernstein’s Mass. Further concert repertoire includes Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony (Babi Yar), Carmina Burana, the Requiems of Brahms and Faure, Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Kindertotenlieder, and Mendelssohn’s Elijah. His recordings include two Grammy-award winning discs: Naxos’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, and Teldarc’s Transmigrations.

Jared Daniel Jones, originally from Ellijay, Georgia, is a Los Angeles based baritone with his most recent engagements being with Lyric Opera of Orange County, Pacific Opera Project, and Opera Italia. Jared performs regularly with the LA Opera chorus, recent performances include William Grant Still’s Highway 1, Turandot, Otello, Tosca, and Lucia di Lamermoor. A graduate of the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA with a Master of Music degree in voice performance, Jared performs throughout Southern California and nationwide as a concert and operatic soloist as well as performing with several professional vocal ensembles. These include the LA Master Chorale, Long Beach Camerata Singers, Pacific Chorale, and Seraphic Fire. Jared’s operatic repertoire includes Shaunard in La Bohème, the father in Hansel and Gretel, Ormondo in Rossini’s L’inganno Felice, Marco in Gianni Schicchi, and principle roles in UCLA’s world premiere productions of Lost Childhood and The Grand Hotel Tartarus.

Heralded by the Los Angeles Times as “. . .a shining example of podium authority and musical enlightenment,” NEAL STULBERG has garnered consistent international acclaim for performances of clarity, insight and conviction. Since 2005, he has served as Director of Orchestral Studies at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. From 2014 to 2018, he served as chair of the UCLA Department of Music,  and currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Music Performance and Artistic Director of UCLA’s Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience.

In North America, Mr. Stulberg has led the Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Atlanta, Fort Worth, Houston, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Mexico City, National, New Jersey, New World, Oregon, Pacific, Phoenix, Saint Louis, San Antonio, San Francisco, Utah and Vancouver symphonies, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and New York City Ballet and San Francisco Ballet. A former assistant conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Carlo Maria Giulini and music director of the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, he is a recipient of the Seaver/National Endowment for the Arts Conductors Award.

Mr. Stulberg’s European appearances have included performances in Germany with the WDR Rundfunkorchester Köln and the orchestras of Augsburg, Bochum, Dortmund, Freiburg, Herford, Jena, Münster, Nürnberg, Oldenburg and Rostock. In Holland, he has conducted the Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and led the Netherlands Ballet Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra, North Holland Philharmonic, Gelders Orchestra and Nieuw Sinfonietta Amsterdam. He has also appeared as guest conductor with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra (Norway), Warsaw Chamber Orchestra, Klaipeda Chamber Orchestra (Lithuania), Athens State Orchestra, London Royal Ballet Sinfonia, Barcelona Liceu Orchestra and Norwegian National Opera Orchestra.

International engagements have also included the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, Moscow Chamber Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Taipei Symphony Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic, Korea Philharmonic (KBS), Queensland, Adelaide and West Australian symphonies, Haifa Symphony Orchestra, Israel Sinfonietta and Ra’anana Symphonette.

An acclaimed pianist, Stulberg has appeared as recitalist, chamber musician and with major orchestras and at international festivals as pianist/conductor. His performances of Mozart concertos conducted from the keyboard are uniformly praised for their buoyant virtuosity and interpretive vigor. In 2011-12, he performed the complete Mozart sonatas for violin and piano with violinist Guillaume Sutre at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall and at the Grandes Heures de Saint Emilion festival in France. In 2018, he performed throughout South Africa on a recital tour with saxophonist Douglas Masek and in 2022, appeared as solo pianist in the world premiere of Inclusion, a new work for pianist and chamber orchestra by Hugh Levick.

Mr. Stulberg has conducted premieres of works by Paul Chihara, Mohammed Fairouz, Jan Friedlin, William Kraft, Alexander Krein, Betty Olivero, Steve Reich, Peter Schat, Lalo Schifrin, Dmitri Smirnov, Earl Stewart, Morton Subotnick, Joan Tower and Peter van Onna, among others, and has also led works by UCLA composers Münir Beken, Bruce Broughton, Kenny Burrell, Mark Carlson, Richard Danielpour, Ian Krouse, David Lefkowitz and James Newton. He conducted the period-instrument orchestra Philharmonia Baroque in a festival of Mozart orchestral and operatic works, and has brought to life several silent movies from the early 1900s, including the Russian classic New Babylon, Shostakovich’s first film score. In August 2022, he conducted the North American premiere of Bas-Sheve, a recently rediscovered and orchestrated 1924 Yiddish-language opera by composer Henekh Kon and librettist Moishe Broderzon, at the Ashkenaz Festival in Toronto. In 2023, Stulberg led acclaimed performances of Dave Brubeck’s cantata, The Gates of Justice (1969) and the West Coast premiere of Lera Auerbach’s Symphony No. 6 (Vessels of Light) (2022) as part of the School of Music’s Music and Justice series, presented in collaboration with the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience.  And in May 2025, he conducted West Coast premiere performances of Tod Machover’s 2018 opera, Schoenberg in Hollywood, as part of the celebration of Arnold Schoenberg’ sesquicentennial.

Collaborators have included John Adams; Leonard Bernstein; Chris, Dan and Darius Brubeck; Dee Dee Bridgewater; John Clayton; Omar Ebrahim; Mercer Ellington; Michael Feinstein; Philip Glass; Morton Gould; David Krakauer; Lar Lubovitch; Tod Machover; Peter Martins; Mark Morris; Angel Romero; Cornel West; and Christopher Wheeldon. He has conducted Philip Glass’ opera Akhnaten at the Rotterdam Festival and Thomas Adès’ Powder Her Face with Long Beach Opera in Los Angeles, and has recorded for Naxos, West German Radio, Donemus, Yarlung Records, Sono Luminus and the Composers Voice label.

Mr. Stulberg has maintained a career-long passion for the training of young musicians. He has conducted and taught at the New World Symphony, Indiana University Summer Institute, Juilliard School, New England Conservatory, New Zealand School of Music, Henry Mancini Institute, Los Angeles Philharmonic Summer Institute, National Repertory Orchestra, Interlochen Arts Academy, American-Russian Youth Orchestra, Turkish Music State Conservatory (Istanbul), National Conservatory of Belarus (Minsk), Central Conservatory of Music (Beijing), Capitol Normal University (Beijing), Shanghai Conservatory of Music and National Taiwan Normal University.  In December 2019, he taught and lectured in Israel at the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music, Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and Haifa University and returned to conduct its symphony orchestra in June 2024.  In March 2026, he conducts the Carlos Chávez Youth Orchestra in Mexico City.

A native of Detroit, Mr. Stulberg is a graduate of Harvard College, the University of Michigan and the Juilliard School. He studied conducting with Franco Ferrara at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, piano with Leonard Shure, Theodore Lettvin, William Masselos and Mischa Kottler, and viola with Ara Zerounian.

James K. Bass, GRAMMY®-winning singer and conductor, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Music, and Director of Choral Studies at The Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA. He is the associate conductor for the Miami-based ensemble Seraphic Fire and is the Artistic Director of the Long Beach Camerata Singers.

Bass is an active soloist and ensemble artist. In 2017 he made his Cleveland Orchestra solo debut singing with Franz Welser-Möst and the orchestra in Miami and in Severance Hall, Cleveland. Other engagements as a soloist include the New World Symphony with Michael Tilson-Thomas, The Florida Orchestra, Grand Rapids Symphony, Back Bay Chorale and Orchestra, Firebird Chamber Orchestra, and The Sebastians. He has appeared with numerous professional vocal ensembles including Seraphic Fire, Conspirare, the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, Apollo Master Chorale, Vox Humanae, True Concord, and Spire. He was the featured baritone soloist on the GRAMMY-nominated recording Pablo Neruda: The Poet Sings with fellow singer Lauren Snouffer, conductor Craig Hella-Johnson, and the GRAMMY-winning ensemble Conpirare. He is one of 13 singers on the GRAMMY®-nominated disc A Seraphic Fire Christmas and appears on CD recordings on the Harmonia Mundi, Naxos, Albany, and Seraphic Fire Media labels.

Bass was selected by the master conductor of the Amsterdam Baroque Soloists, Ton Koopman, to be one of only 20 singers for a presentation of Cantatas by J. S. Bach in Carnegie Hall and was an auditioned member of Robert Shaw’s workshop choir at Carnegie. He has appeared as conductor with the Florida Orchestra during their annual education concerts.

During his tenure as Artistic Director for the Master Chorale of Tampa Bay, the official chorus of the Florida Orchestra, he was responsible for five recordings and multiple world premieres. In 2012 he served as chorusmaster and co-editor for the Naxos recording entitled Delius: Sea Drift and Appalachia featuring the Florida Orchestra and conducted by Stefan Sanderling. In 2014 he was the principal preparer for the recording Holiday Pops Live! conducted by the principal pops conductor Jeff Tyzik. During his tenure as a chorusmaster, he has prepared choirs for Sir Colin Davis, Sir David Willcocks, Jahja Ling, Michael Tilson-Thomas, Gerard Schwarz, Giancarlo Guerrero, Michael Francis, Marcelo Lehninger, Stefan Sanderling, Evan Rogister, Danail Rachlev, Joshua Weilerstein, Markus Huber, David Lockington, Xian Zhang, Patrick Quigley, and Neal Stulberg.

His professional career has coincided with the development of Seraphic Fire as one of the premier vocal ensembles in the United States. He has been actively involved as soloist, ensemble artist, editor, producer, and preparer for 14 of the ensemble’s recordings and routinely conducts the ensemble in Miami and on tour. During the summer of 2011, he co-founded the Professional Choral Institute. In its inaugural year of recording, Seraphic Fire and PCI received the GRAMMY® nomination for Best Choral Performance for their recording of Johannes Brahms’ Ein Deuthches Requiem. As the Director of Education for the ensemble, he has been involved with annual events that service more than 2000 students in the Miami-Dade county area each year. In 2017 Seraphic Fire and UCLA launched a new educational initiative entitled the Ensemble Artist Program that aims to identify and train the next generation of high-level ensemble singers.

Bass received his Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Miami, where he was a doctoral fellow, and is a graduate of the Interlochen Arts Academy.