KoDa presents: World Music

Doors Open at 7:00 PM
Concert starts at 8:00 PM
Drinks(alcoholic and non-alcoholic) and light food will be served.

A Sonic Profile of Human Experience with music from Asia, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and North America.

Kofi Hayford is a prize-winning British Ghanaian-American bass, acclaimed for an “impressive,” “sonorous,” and “stentorian” voice of distinctive timbre. With more than 40 operatic roles in his repertoire, he has appeared in opera and concert with organizations including the Metropolitan Opera Guild, Fort Worth Opera, Indianapolis Opera, and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.

A double laureate of the 2024 Grand Voix Lyrique d’Afrique International Competition, Hayford made his mainstage Carnegie Hall debut in May 2024. His performances have drawn enthusiastic, sold-out audiences from the Arctic Circle to the Caribbean, and across Europe and Africa. Recent engagements include a concert tour in Martinique, a performance at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Auditorium as part of AfterArts’ Annual Showcase, a six-city concert tour in France, and the bass solo in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the United Nations Orchestra.

In September 2025, he made his Lincoln Center debut at Alice Tully Hall with the Manhattan Philharmonic Society, performing a major work about the Yellow River in Mandarin. Recent engagements include concerts in New York City, the United Kingdom, and France, as well as his Verdi Requiem debut in Massachusetts in April 2026. He will be competing as a Semi-Finalist in the UK as a contestant in the Black British Classical Foundation's Voice of Black Opera competition in London.

Mr. Hayford holds a Bachelor’s degree from SUNY Buffalo, is the co-founder of the DictionBuddy mobile app, and serves as Chairman of the Board of the Groupmuse Foundation, where he is active in arts leadership and advocacy.

Daniel Beliavsky, Ph.D., is an educator, concert pianist, music theorist, composer, and filmmaker. He has performed in Europe and throughout the United States with both orchestra and in recital— notable engagements include concerto performances with the Milwaukee and New Jersey Symphony Orchestras and the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra. His discography includes the world-premiere recording of composer Lukas Foss’s complete piano works, as well as music by J.S. Bach, Domenico Scarlatti, Franz Schubert, Frederic Chopin, and Modest Mussorgsky. 
Daniel produces music documentaries through his production company, Opus1films, which in 2011 released Sonata (1957), a film about the distinguished American composer Donald Harris’s opus one, the Sonata for piano, and about Harris’s early career in Paris. That film was shown at Lincoln Center in New York City and was broadcast on public television. More recently, Daniel completed Secret Music and Gay Body of Music, a feature and short film, respectively, about Pulitzer Prize winning composer David Del Tredici and the contemporary social and cultural impact of his music. These films have won multiple accolades, and have been screened at film and music festivals, including the Wisconsin Film Festival, the Mostly Modern Music Festival, the American Music Festival, QFest Houston, the Lonely Seal International Film Festival, the Toronto LGBTQ+ Film Festival, the San Diego International Film Festival, Berlin Shorts, the Rotterdam Independent Film Festival, and the San Francisco Arthouse Short Festival.

Now Chair of the Fine Art and Music Department at Yeshiva University in New York City, Daniel has been a visiting professor of music theory, piano performance, aesthetics, writing about music, and history at several universities, including the City College of New York, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Stern College, Montclair State University, the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, Mannes College, and New York University.

What's the music?

Daniel Beliavsky Piano

Kofi Hayford Voice

Attendees

Marc R.

Ritvik P.