Adult Biographies
Phyllis Bryn-Julson
Recognized as one of the most authoritative interpreters of vocal music of the 20th century, Phyllis Bryn-Julson commands a remarkable repertoire of literature spanning several centuries. Ms. Bryn-Julson retired from the voice faculty of The Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Her students continue to win prizes and awards, and have made careers in some of the leading opera houses and orchestra venues.
Ms. Bryn-Julson is an editor of the English song translations in the Children’s Rhymes Project.
Eileen Cornett
Eileen Cornett is the principal faculty coach with Peabody’s Opera Theater Program at The Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University.
Ms. Cornett is an International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) advisor for Laura Kafka-Price and Maksymilian Krzak’s Polish Pronunciation Guide for Singers, and an editor of the English version of the Children’s Rhymes piano-vocal score. She is the mother of Emily Cornett.
Emily Cornett
Emily Cornett is a freelance cellist and a social worker for Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition in Washington, DC. She holds a B.A. in American Studies and Psychology from Yale University and a Master’s in Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis.
Ms. Cornett prepared specially selected voice-over recitations from the Children’s Rhymes Project recordings for the project’s YouTube channel.
Sal Ferrantelli
Sal Ferrantelli retired in 2017 from a distinguished 36-year career as professor of choral music at Monterey Peninsula College in Monterey, California where he taught and conducted since 1981. He is an arranger and composer, as well as an educator, conductor, and singer.
Dr. Ferrantelli has arranged Szymanowski’s “Kołysanka lalek” (Lullaby of the Dolls) for female choir, and “Prosię” (Piglet) for mixed choir, both with piano accompaniment.
Lauren Fray
Lauren Fray is an artist who has commissioned paintings and digital prints and pattern designs. She pulls a lot of her inspiration from nature and uses a mixture of mediums along with digital art.
Ms. Fray was one of the judges for the Children’s Rhymes Illustration Contest.
Aaron Gage
Aaron Gage is an award-winning composer and performer. He strives to create a unique blend of styles using orchestra mixed with rock band and combining traditional classical instruments with non-standard ones such as the steel pan.
Mr. Gage prepared for publication the English language version of Karol Szymanowski’s Rymy dziecięce (Children’s Rhymes), op. 49 score.
Daniel Guss
Daniel Guss is the general manager of Early Music Foundation in New York City. He is a former senior director, Catalogue Development at BMG Classics/RCA Red Seal.
Mr. Guss is the co-producer of the Children’s Rhymes Project.
Dominick Guzzi
Dominick Guzzi is the owner since 1967 of Dominick’s Hair stylist, a full-service salon.
Mr. Guzzi has been Laura Kafka-Price’s hairstylist for over 20 years.
Robert Harrison
Robert Harrison’s distinguished singing and teaching career has taken him throughout the world as a singer, master teacher, and presenter at numerous music conferences and meetings of professional music organizations. Dr. Harrison is also a scripter.
An example of his scripting is in Szymanowski’s and Iłłakowiczówna’s names as they appear on the home page of this website.
Richard Hartzell
Richard Hartzell maintains a private voice studio in Silver Spring, Maryland. For over the past 25 years, he has been chair of the annual voice competition for the Maryland State Music Teachers Association.
Mr. Hartzell was part of the recording team for the songs for Children’s Rhymes Project.
Page Hite
Page Hite was the original webmaster for the Children’s Rhymes Project. He was an IT consultant who was also involved in professional photography, music production, documentary film production, and web design. He and his wife Agnes were well-known in the greater Washington area as great supports of a wide variety of live music genres. Together, they publish “Page’s Picks” recommending concerts of live music to their many friends. Mr. Hite passed away on August 31, 2020 of metastatic, non-smoking related lung cancer that moved to his brain. Everyone associated with the Children’s Rhymes Project is grateful for his contribution of creative ideas to the design of the CRP website. He will be greatly missed.
Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna
Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna (1892-1983) was a Polish poet, writer of prose, playwright, and translator. Kazimiera was born on August 6, 1892, in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her parents, Barbara Iłłakowiczówna and Klemens Zan, both died when she was young. She went to live with relatives and Zofia Buyno became her foster mother.
When she was 16, Kazimiera studied for a year at the prestigious University of Oxford in England. While at Oxford, she became familiar with the work of Emmeline Pankhurst, a British political activist, and leader of the British suffragette movement who helped women win the right to vote. Iłłakowiczówna actively participated in the feminist movement by distributing suffragette brochures.
From 1910 to 1914, she continued her studies in Kraków at the Jagiellonian University. She was a deeply religious Christian throughout her long life, so it is not surprising that among her first works, written during her student days, were religious poems. After completing her education, she worked as a nurse’s assistant in the Russian Army. Beginning in 1918, after Poland regained independence, she was employed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland. From 1926 to 1935, Kazimiera was secretary to Polish statesman Józef Piłsudski, First Marshal of Poland, and de facto leader of the Second Polish Republic as the Minister of Military Affairs.
Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna was one of the most celebrated poets in Poland from 1918 to 1939, the years between the two world wars. During this time, her works were published, most notably in the literary magazine Tęcza (Rainbow) in the city of Poznań. When World War II broke out in 1939, she was evacuated to Romania. The poet returned to Poland in 1947 and settled in Poznań.
Iłłakowiczówna never married, but she maintained a wide circle of friends, which included Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Julian Tuwim, and Maria Dąbrowska. Her command of languages allowed her to translate works of European literature by such writers as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Böll, and Leo Tolstoy, as well as the American poet Emily Dickinson. She also worked as a teacher of English. In her last years, Kazimiera became blind as a result of unsuccessful glaucoma surgery. She died on February 16, 1983, six months before her 91st birthday. She is buried in Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw, Poland.
Laura Kafka-Price
Laura Kafka-Price is an American soprano of Polish heritage from Monterey, California with a multi-dimensional career as a singer, musicologist, and educator. She is a Lecturer at The Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University. She maintains a private teaching studio and an active singing career.
Dr. Laura Kafka-Price is the originator and co-producer of the Children’s Rhymes Project. Her Polish Pronunciation Guide for Singers, co-authored with Maksymilian Krzak, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2024. She also wrote the children’s book Katot and Kazia, and her recordings of Rymy dziecięce op. 49 in Polish and English, with Tomasz Robak at the piano, will be released by Centaur Records next year.
Maksymilian Krzak
Violist Maksymilian Krzak earned a Master of Music degree from The Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University. He was born and raised in Gdańsk, Poland, where he also studied voice performance. He is a recipient of a scholarship from The Kosciuszko Foundation in New York.
Mr. Krzak co-authored with Laura Kafka-Price a book on Polish lyric diction for singers, scheduled to be published by Oxford University Press in 2024. He is also the editor and translator for Kafka-Price’s children’s book, Katot and Kazia, and an editor for the Children’s Rhymes Project website.
JoAnn Kulesza
JoAnn Kulesza was the Director of Opera Programs at The Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University. She is now a lecturer of vocal performance at The Catholic University of America.
Ms. Kulesza is an editor of the English score translation of Szymanowski’s Rymy dziecięce.
Mark Landis
Mark Landis creates commissioned original drawings and paintings using customer-submitted photographs. He utilizes many mediums for these pieces, including charcoal, pencil, oil paint, acrylic paint, watercolors, and pastels.
Mr. Landis painted the whimsical piece on this website of Tomasz Robak posing as composer Karol Szymanowski, and Laura Kafka-Price as his sister Stanisława Korwin-Szymanowska in front of the composer’s villa Atma in Zakopane, Poland, now the Szymanowski Museum.
Celia Larkin
Celia Larkin was born in Poland and moved to America at an early age. For 10 years she hosted a Polish radio program in Detroit, after which she spent more than 25 years in government service, some of it overseas. She is currently the vice president of the Polish American Arts Association of Washington, DC, and produces the organization’s newsletter. She is a member of the Arts Club of Washington, and serves on the boards of several organizations.
Ms. Larkin is the translation editor and reviser of the Children’s Rhymes Project texts and poems.
Scott Metcalfe
Scott Metcalfe is an audio engineer and music technologist based in Baltimore. He is director of Recording Arts and Sciences at The Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University. Additionally, he is program coordinator for the Sound Concentration of Hopkins’s Advanced Academic Programs MA degree in Film and Media, and associate director of The Sound Sleep Studio (research facility of The Sleeping Brain Lab at The Johns Hopkins Hospital). In 2017, he published a book Creating Sound from Scratch.
Mr. Metcalfe is the recording engineer for the Children’s Rhymes Project. In addition to the recordings of the Children’s Rhymes poems on this website, he engineered the companion recordings for Kafka-Price and Krzak’s Polish Pronunciation Guide for Singers, and Kafka-Price and Robak’s recording of Szymanowski’s Rymy dziecięce, op. 49. He is the father of Nathaniel Metcalfe.
Bill Morgan
Bill Morgan is a professional photographer in Hartford Connecticut, specializing in performance and portrait photography for dancers, musicians, and actors. In addition to his work as a photographer, Mr. Morgan also works as a commercial designer for both print and web.
Mr. Morgan is the webmaster for the Children’s Rhymes Project and the layout designer for Kafka-Price’s children’s book, Katot and Kazia.
Patti Pogodzinski
Patti Pogodzinski received a master’s degree in Illustration Practice from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2015, she received a scholarship from the Polish American Arts Association of Washington, DC.
Ms. Pogodzinski is the illustrator and layout designer for the Children’s Rhymes Project website. Her artwork also appears in the children’s book Katot and Kazia. She was one of the judges for the Children’s Rhymes Illustration Contest.
Dorota Ponikiewska
Dorota Ponikiewska is a medical indexer at the National Institutes of Health, Polish teacher, theater lover, and founding director of the Polish Drama Club of Silver Spring, Maryland. She works closely with various Polish organizations in the Washington, DC area, including the Polish Saturday School, Our Lady Queen of Poland Church, the Polish Library, and Polish National Alliance Baltimore, as well as the Embassy of the Republic of Poland.
Ms. Ponikiewska is the recitation coach for the recordings of the Children’s Rhymes poems in Polish. You can also hear her reciting the parts of the narrator, Window, Mother, and Krystyna in the ballade “The Malicious Starling” in Polish. She is the mother of Milena Angela Muñoz.
Elizabeth Rendón-Sherman
Elizabeth Rendón-Sherman is Chief Executive Officer/Chief Financial Officer of LG-TEK.
Ms. Rendón-Sherman recites the part of Mother in “The Malicious Starling” and is the real-life mother of Rosalinda Sherman.
Isabella Robak
Isabella Robak is a photographer. While her artistic preference has always been with the beautiful aesthetic of film, she is also well-versed in digital photography. Isabella enjoys taking photographs that find a meeting point in fine art and photojournalism.
All the photographs of Laura Kafka-Price and Tomasz Robak on this website are the work of Isabella Robak.
Tomasz Robak
Tomasz Robak is a Polish-American concert pianist, chamber musician, organist, and educator. He has performed as a soloist and recitalist across the United States and in Europe. In the fall of 2019, he joined the faculty of Davidson College in North Carolina.
Dr. Robak is the pianist for Laura Kafka-Price on their recording of Karol Szymanowski’s Rymy dziecięce, op. 49, which will be released by Centaur Records in 2024.
Karol Szymanowski
Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) is regarded as the most important Polish composer since the death of Fryderyk Chopin in 1849. He is considered to be a post-romantic composer, meaning his music sounds more contemporary than that of composers who came before him in the 19th century. Among his compositions is Rymy dziecięce (Children’s Rhymes), op. 49, a collection of songs to the poetry of Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna.
Szymanowski was born on his grandfather’s estate in Tymoszówka, on October 3, 1882. During that time, Tymoszówka was in the part of Poland that after the partitions of 1795 was under the Tstarist Russian empire occupation. Presently, Tymoszówka is located in Ukraine. Poland’s independence was restored at the end of World War I in 1918 when Szymanowski was 36 years old. The entire family had a long history of being fiercely devoted Polish patriots. Even though Tymoszówka was part of Russia during Karol’s childhood, it is not surprising that he identified himself as a Polish composer.
Karol, affectionately called “Katot” by his family, was the middle child of five Szymanowski siblings, and the only one born in Tymoszówka. He had three sisters: Zofia, a poet whom the family called “Zioka,” Stanisława, a singer, and Anna, a painter whom the family called “Nula.” His brother, Felix, was a pianist and composer of operettas and light music.
Szymanowski’s first music teacher was his father, from whom he learned to play the piano, plus a little music theory and harmony. He started composing when he was 14. After completing high school, Karol went to Warsaw, where he enrolled in the Music Institute (presently the University of Music) in 1901. By 1905, the young composer and colleagues Grzegorz Fitelberg, Ludomir Różycki, and Apolinary Szeluto, under the patronage of Prince Władysław Lubomirski, founded Spółka Nakładowa Młodych Kompozytorów Polskich (Young Polish Composers Publishing Company). This organization initiated a fresh, enthusiastic direction for the young artists of the day. Szymanowski and his partners published their own compositions and presented their own concerts throughout Europe.
Szymanowski would go on to compose 90 works (62 with opus numbers) in a wide variety of styles and genres, among them stage works (including operas), symphonies, concertos, cantatas, songs with orchestra, instrumental chamber music, works for solo piano, works for violin and piano, solo songs with piano accompaniment (like Rymy dziecięce) and choral works. He also wrote 95 essays and articles about music.
Karol Szymanowski died of acute tuberculosis in Lausanne, Switzerland on Easter Sunday, March 29, 1937. His body was brought back to Poland by his sister Stanisława and was laid to rest at Skałka in Kraków, the national mausoleum reserved for only the most distinguished Poles.
https://culture.pl/en/article/karol-szymanowski-biography
https://culture.pl/en/work/childrend-rhymes-op-49-karol-szymanowski
Carla Hazard Tomaszewski
Carla Hazard Tomaszewski is a retired award-winning graphic designer and illustrator. She is an awardee of the Cavalier’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. Carla’s most recent work has been authoring, designing, and illustrating the children’s book POLAND: A Portrait of the Country Through Its Festivals and Traditions.
Ms. Tomaszewski was one of the judges for the Children’s Rhymes Illustration Contest.
Katharine Toth
Katharine Toth is a singer and clarinetist with an interest in wildlife biology and biostatistics. She earned a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences with a minor in chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh. She’s working on a master’s degree in biotechnology with a bioinformatics specialization while working full-time at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
Ms. Toth was a transcriber of the word-by-word translations and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols for the Children’s Rhymes poems.