Martha Guth | Co-Director

Juno-nominated soprano Martha Guth’s solo recital and concert highlights include Wigmore Hall, Lincoln Center, The National Cathedral, St. John Smith Square, The Toronto Symphony Orchestra, The Chicago Philharmonic, Leeds Lieder, Oxford Lieder, Voices of Ascension, and many more.  Longtime recital and touring partners include Graham Johnson and Erika Switzer. Her recitals have been recorded and broadcast for the CBC/Radio-Canada, the BBC, and the WDR in Germany and she has worked under the batons of Maestro’s Seiji Ozawa, Robert Spano, Helmut Rilling, John Nelson, Richard Bradshaw, and Alan Gilbert among others. Her discography includes Juno-nominated Summer Night: songs by Healy Willan; Das Ewig Weibliche: Schubert songs with Penelope Crawford on fortepiano; Roberto Sierra’s Beyond the Silence of Sorrow with the Orquesta Sinfonica de Puerto Rico (nominated for a Latin GRAMMY); Go by Contraries, songs of Andrew Staniland, and the first Five Boroughs Song Book.

 Dr. Guth is Assistant Professor of Voice at Oberlin College, and for Songfest, she is on faculty, the administrative team, and is the Director of the Composer/Mentorship program.

Erika Switzer is an accomplished collaborative pianist who performs regularly in major concert settings around the world, such as New York’s Weill Hall (Carnegie), Frick Collection, and the Kennedy Center. Her performances have been called “precise and lucid” (New York Times), and “intelligent, refined, and captivating” (Le Monde). She has won numerous awards, including best pianist prizes at the Robert Schumann, Hugo Wolf, and Wigmore Hall International Song Competitions. Switzer is a co-founder of the organization Sparks & Wiry Cries, which promotes the advancement and preservation of art song. She serves on the music faculty at Bard College and Conservatory of Music, and holds a doctorate from The Juilliard School.

Noted for her “dazzling, virtuoso singing” (Boston Globe), soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon delights in the range of sonic possibility inherent in the human voice. With a repertoire ranging from the Baroque to the present day, she specializes in the dusty corners of the canon – giving modern premieres of rediscovered works from the Baroque through the mid-20th century – and is sought-out for her collaborations with today’s composers.
Lucy serves on the faculty of Bard College Conservatory and has been in residence at the Marlboro Music Festival annually since 2016. She is honored to be the recipient of a 2024 Fellowship from the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, whose generous support will enable upcoming commissioning, recording, and performance projects.

Canadian/American soprano Jardena Gertler-Jaffe has been praised for her genuine and intelligent performance, and her creativity on and off the stage. As a multi-faceted artist and scholar, Jardena enjoys contributing to the classical music landscape in many ways, through workshopping and premiering new music, (ethno)musicological scholarship, and curating and singing imaginative performances. Jardena's recent work includes singing the roles of Krystyna Zywulska in Jake Heggie’s opera Two Remain, Marzelline in Beethoven’s Fidelio, a recital inspired by the life of Alma Mahler with mentor/collaborator Erika Switzer, and workshopping the roles of Gitl in Dan Shore’s Greeners and Thea in Danika Loren’s Hedda. Jardena made the Canadian premiere of Alex Weiser’s Pulitzer-nominated set and all the days were purple, and the world premiere of Dan Shore’s Five Songs from Anna Berkowitz, works that also align with her love of and interest in Yiddish language and culture. Jardena is a PhD student in Music Performance at New York University, and is an alumna of the University of Toronto and Bard College Conservatory Vocal Arts Program. She joined the Sparks staff in 2020.