La Vie Bohème: A Parisian Cabaret

Benjamin Binder

Benjamin Binder, musicologist and pianist, is Professor of Music and Chair of the Musicianship Department at Duquesne University’s Mary Pappert School of Music. He holds a master's degree in piano performance from Washington University and a Ph.D. in musicology from Princeton University.

His scholarly work on 19th-century Austro-German music, art song, and classical music performance has been published in Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Current Musicology, Music Theory Online, and in edited volumes from Oxford University Press, Indiana University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Routledge. Recent publications include the “Performance and Reception” chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’ (Cambridge University Press), “Performance Matters in Heine: The Case of Pauline Viardot’s ‘Das ist ein schlechtes Wetter’” (in Song Beyond the Nation: Translation, Transnationalism, Performance, Oxford University Press) and “Modern and Sentimental Voices in Scott Wheeler’s Wasting the Night” (in 20th- and 21st-Century Song Cycles: Analytical Pathways Toward Performance, Routledge). Dr. Binder has presented papers at regional, national, and international scholarly conferences, including meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Music Theory, the Phenomenon of Singing International Symposium, the Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, and the Biennial North American Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music. In 2024, his book The Lied at the Crossroads of Performance and Musicology (a co-edited essay collection with Dr. Jennifer Ronyak) was published by Cambridge.

As a pianist, Dr. Binder has been a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and a participant in the Cleveland Institute of Music Art Song Festival. He has accompanied vocal and instrumental recitals throughout North America. He regularly presents innovative song recitals and solo performances throughout the Pittsburgh area and beyond, including collaborations with the Carnegie Museum of Art, Andy Warhol Museum, City of Asylum, and Duquesne University.

As a public-facing scholar, Dr. Binder wrote a script for Thomas Hampson's Song: Mirror of the World public radio series which was broadcast nationwide in the USA on the WFMT Radio Network in 2015 and throughout southwestern Germany on SWR Kultur in 2018. He has also researched, written, and delivered interactive scripts as an event host for concerts with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

From 2010-14, working together with pianist and vocal coach Cameron Stowe of the New England Conservatory, Dr. Binder was the director and co-founder of the Vancouver International Song Institute's Song Scholarship and Performance program at the University of British Columbia, a unique song workshop and summer course for performers, musicologists, theorists, and literary scholars. The program brought together groups of students and professionals to encourage cross-disciplinary approaches in the study of song.

For more information, please visit http://www.benjaminbindermusic.com.

Robert Frankenberry

Robert Frankenberry enjoys a multi-faceted relationship with music as a singer, pianist, conductor, orchestrator, producer, director, and composer. During his time as music production staff for Pittsburgh Festival Opera, he was integral to more than 35 summer festival productions, conducting operas in a Hookah lounge (Carmen, reconfigured for ensemble cast and using his own folk-ensemble orchestration), on and around a cemetery lake (Ricky Ian Gordon’s Orpheus and Euridice), and on and in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater (Daron Hagen’s Shining Brow). In 2019, he was granted the honor of adapting, arranging, and orchestrating two of Mr. Rogers’ one-act operas for live performance, leading the premiere performances from the keyboard. Most recently, he led performances of Don DiNicola’s environmental opera Vespa at The Old Stone House in Brooklyn, and Transformations and La Clemenza di Tito for Carnegie Mellon Opera.

On stage, he has performed a wide range of roles, including Mozart (Amadeus), John Adams (1776), Bacchus (Ariadne auf Naxos), Alfredo (La Traviata), The Duke of Mantua (Rigoletto), Count Carl-Magnus (A Little Night Music), Rodolfo (La Boheme), and the title roles in Don Carlo, The Tales of Hoffmann, Faust, and Willy Wonka. As a member of Millennial Arts Productions’ Baroque Opera Institute, he received specialized training in Baroque gesture and vocal performance style, and appeared in a fully-staged off-broadway production of Handel’s Messiah. On film, he sang starring roles in all three of Daron Hagen’s Bardo Trilogy operafilms for which he also provided musical direction (Orson Rehearsed; 9/10: Love Before the Fall; and I Hear America Singing), also serving as executive producer for the third film. In 2021, he played the role of Giuseppe Verdi in Resonance Works’ feature-length vegetable-puppet film Verdi by Vegetables. He has enjoyed a special association with the vocal works of David Del Tredici, including the premieres of several major song cycles with the composer at the piano, and the first complete performance of Wondrous the Merge.

Active as an arranger, orchestrator and composer, Robert has a catalog of adaptations/orchestrations of operas by Dvorák, Offenbach, Pauline Viardot, Mr. Rogers, Strauss, Gluck, Bizet, Verdi, and Ravel; and small-ensemble arrangements of works by Busoni, Hagen, Mahler, Mompou, Prokofiev, Ravel, Satie, Schumann, Strauss, Stravinsky, and others. His first opera, The Blue Fairy, was premiered by Aria412 in June of 2025. He and librettist Kip Soteres are currently at work on their second major project, an opera about the Edison/Westinghouse current wars.

At the piano, notable achievements include the North American premieres of Judith Weir’s Piano Trio Two and Julia Perry’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in Two Speeds, and the world premiere of David Del Tredici’s virtuosic showpiece melodrama MONSTERS II: Scylla and Charybdis for narrating pianist. He currently performs as a member of entelechron with cellist David Russell and violinist Roger Zahab and Chrysalis Duo with flutist Lindsay Goodman.

Robert has served on the accompanying and coaching staff at Seton Hill, Duquesne, Carnegie Mellon, and Point Park universities; the voice faculty at Mercyhurst (where he was also Bassoon Instructor and Director of Orchestra Studies) and Point Park Universities; and the Theatre Arts faculty at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as visiting Music Director for the opera program at the University of North Texas. He is currently Associate Producer for Resonance Works, Voice Faculty at Point Park University, and Residency Faculty of the MFA in Music Composition program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

He can be heard singing and playing on the Naxos, Albany, New World Records, Roven Records, Navona, New Dynamic Records, and Innova labels. www.robertfrankenberry.com

Nicole Vilkner

Singer and musicologist, Nicole Vilkner is Associate Professor of Music at Duquesne University’s Mary Pappert School of Music. Her research has focused on nineteenth-century French musical culture, including opera, salons, urban soundscapes, and the architecture of performance spaces. Her recent publications on the sonic history of Paris include articles in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of Musicology, Journal of the Royal Music Association, Cambridge Opera Journal, as well as book chapters in Four Centuries of Women’s Musical Salons (Cambridge University Press) and Music-Cultural Exchange and the Nineteenth-Century Salon (Oxford University Press).

Committed to public-facing scholarship, Dr. Vilkner leads The Soundwalk Project, a public humanities initiative at Duquesne in which students collaborate with museums and community partners to create sound exhibits that bring local history to life. Award-winning installations are open to the public at The Frick Pittsburgh and in the Hill District. A forthcoming exhibit at the Heinz History Center’s Meadowcroft site, opening in spring 2027, will continue to expand the ways regional history is experienced and taught.

As a vocalist, Dr. Vilkner has performed regularly with the Russian Chamber Chorus of New York and premiered new works through the American Composers Alliance, collaborating closely with contemporary song composers including Joyce Hope Suskind, Tom Cipullo, Emil Awad, and Sarah Dawson. She has performed at a wide range of venues—from the Nicholas Roerich Museum, surrounded by paintings similar to the scenery Roerich created for Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, to the medieval Nikolaikirche in the Hanseatic city of Wismar, Germany, and the intimate, jewel box of Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall.

Dr. Vilkner holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Rutgers University, an M.M. in vocal performance from Manhattan School of Music, and an A.B. in English from Princeton University.