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If you’re a musical theater fan—of classic or contemporary Broadway, grand opera, or anything in between—you can sit down to a feast this Saturday at the 2025 Lotte Lenya Competition. This international singing contest, to be held at Eastman’s Kilbourn Hall and also livestreamed, has been sponsored by the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music since 1998.
The Lenya Competition’s namesake was one of the great performing artists of the 20th century. A Vienna-born performer with an intoxicating voice once described as “an octave below laryngitis,” Lotte Lenya became a star in 1920s Berlin performing “Threepenny Opera” and “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” by author Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill (who was also her husband). She embodied the phrase “singing actress” in her career as fully as anyone ever has. (You can see Lenya here as Brecht’s formidable “Mother Courage,” although she’s better-known to Americans for her memorable turns in the James Bond movie “From Russia with Love” and the musical “Cabaret.”)
After Weill’s premature death in 1950, and until her own death in 1981, Lenya championed her husband’s legacy. She won a Tony Award in 1954 in a long-running revival of “Threepenny Opera,” and frequently performed Weill’s songs, musicals, and operas in concerts and TV appearances, and on records. Her bequests helped establish the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, which promotes Weill’s and Lenya’s legacies worldwide, not least in this singing competition.
From its relatively modest beginnings, the Lenya Competition has developed “a real international reach,” says Kim Kowalke. Weill Foundation president and founder (and enthusiastic host) of the competition, Kowalke is also a retired UR and Eastman musicology professor, who is an authority on Weill.
Saturday’s finalists come from seven countries on four continents, including Africa and Australia, and range in age from 24 to 32.
“We’ve gone global,” says Kowalke proudly. “It’s the result of making it easy for anyone to audition through our website.” (For more information about each of the 2025 finalists, go to www.kwf.org.)
While there are only a few winners, in a sense none of the finalists loses, in that judges spend the following month giving valuable artistic feedback to those who didn’t win a prize—in addition to professional feedback given throughout the audition process.
And if they don’t succeed, many of them do try again: Kowalke says that one of the 2025 finalists is taking part after his seventh try. Persistence can pay off: the competition’s top three prizes are $25,000, $20,000, and $15,000, along with several discretionary awards, for a total of $90,000 in prize money.
The finals are actually a long feast with a delicious dessert. From 1 to 4:30 p.m., you’ll hear songs and arias by composers from Mozart and Verdi to Jule Styne and Jason Robert Brown, as each finalist presents a 15-minute program of selections in four categories: an opera or operetta aria; songs from American musicals written before, and after, 1968; and a song or aria by Kurt Weill. “Dessert” is at 7:30 p.m., when the finalists return to perform a concert and hear the final prize decisions.
(You can be a judge this year, for the first time, as the Lenya Competition introduces an Audience Choice Award. Live in Kilbourn Hall or watching the livestream, you can vote for your favorite. Full information on all aspects of the competition is here.)
It’s a demanding process, but as Opera News described it, “No vocal contest better targets today’s total-package talents.” It also pays off professionally: versatility in a performer equals employability, whether on Broadway, on an opera stage, or in a concert hall. Past Lenya competition finalists and winners have recently been seen in such Broadway shows as “The Great Gatsby,” “Les Misérables,” “Titanic,” and Disney’s “Aladdin,” as well as performing in American and European opera houses.
The contest celebrates Weill, a composer of opera and musicals in Germany, who became even more famous after emigrating with Lenya to New York, with such hit shows as “Lady in the Dark,” “One Touch of Venus,” and the Broadway opera “Street Scene.”
Weill’s immediately memorable tunes and acid-tinged harmonies transferred effortlessly from Berlin theaters and cabarets to the Great American Songbook, with such outstanding numbers as “My Ship” and “Speak Low.” (Kowalke points out that you can hear “Mack the Knife” nightly on Broadway once again, as Jonathan Groff channels Bobby Darin in the musical “Just in Time.”)
All three judges for the 2025 Lenya Competition are well acquainted with Weill’s music.
Conductor Rob Berman presented a number of Weill’s Broadway musicals as the artistic director of the New York City Center Encores! series of great musicals in concert. A Grammy and Emmy winner, Berman is a familiar figure at the Lenya Competition, returning several times as a judge.
“It’s a hard competition to judge,” he says. “We have no preconceived notions about the performers until we actually hear them in performance. They’re all very competitive, they all perform at a very high level, and we try to do the right thing.”
“We show up, and judge the singers in the moment,” says Catherine Malfitano, a first-time judge this year. “They need to be their best self in that moment, like a sports champion.
“I look at the singers’ delivery of texts, their ability to create a character, to make that moment real for us,” she adds. “I want to be swept away—isn’t that what we all want from musical theater?”
This famous soprano has played several Weill roles, in “Street Scene,”
“Mahagonny,” and “The Seven Deadly Sins” (which requires singing and dancing). Malfitano has also included many Weill songs in her recitals because, she says simply, “I adore his music. Weill’s melodies to me are incredible, and as a musical dramatist he is second to none. Every song he wrote is theatrical.” (Incidentally, she also met Lotte Lenya briefly, after a New York City Opera performance.)
Alison Moritz, director of Central City Opera, remembers attending the Lenya Competition finals in 2020, when she was an Eastman master’s student in opera directing. Now, as a first-time judge, she looks forward to “an exciting and virtuosic day” in Kilbourn Hall.
“To me, Weill’s is theater with a message. In opera, we operate at Level 10 intensity anyway,” she says. “But Weill’s emotional intensity, and the chameleon quality of his music, is unique.”
As directors, Berman and Moritz (who recently staged Weill’s “Lost in the Stars” for Washington National Opera) will also be judging the competition as talent scouts. Berman says he has hired two or three Lenya Competition finalists for almost every Encores! production, and the Weill Foundation website offers a long history of participants’ professional credits.
“The judges and the Weill Foundation have always been proactive with young performers,” says Moritz. “They are set up to succeed.”
“This competition requires performers who can straddle the categories and pull off opera, operetta, and musical theater,” says Berman. “It truly rewards people who can do it all.”
The Kurt Weill Foundation for Music presents the 2025 Lotte Lenya Competition Finals on Saturday, May 3, from 1 to 4:30 p.m. in Kilbourn Hall, Eastman School of Music, and the Finalists’ Concert at 7:30 p.m. General admission is free. Final-round events will be available for streaming live online and on demand afterward at www.kwf.org
David Raymond is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer.
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