Josselin Lifton-Zoline Sings at the Opera House

At the center of this year’s fundraiser for Mountain Sprouts Preschool is soprano Josselin Lifton-Zoline, who has come home to Telluride after nearly two decades on the East Coast, studying music, first at Smith College and then, for the last seven years, in New York City with Aspen Music School teacher Irene Gubrud.

Lifton-Zoline will sing a program of her favorite songs. “

“The ones I’ve chosen are my favorites,” says Lifton-Zoline, a teacher at Mountain Sprouts. “I wanted it to be music that I really love and am attached to. I didn’t choose any music that I don’t love to sing.

“I have loved music since the time I was tiny,” she says. “I knew I loved it when I was 3. It’s the most complex and exciting thing in the world to me.”

Today, she says, it’s important to her to sing music that is “accessible to an audience that doesn’t know opera.”

To that end, the first set, she promises, will be “child-friendly” and accessible, with American songs ranging from “I Bought Me a Cat” by Aaron Copeland to “Ol’ Jim,” by Clara Edwards.

It’s a performance she has taken on the road – once on a tour through the Czech Republic, four years ago, and more recently in Telluride.

Joining her onstage in a duet, “La ci darem la mano,” from Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, is the singer’s father, John Lifton-Zoline.

Rounding out the program are Copland’s “Long Time Ago,” “The Boatmen’s Dance” and “Simple Gifts;” Schubert’s “Romanze aus Rosamunde” and “An die Musik;” Brahms’s “Vergebliches Standchen” and “Dein Blaues Auge;” Charles Ives’s “At the River” and “To Edith” and John Jacob Niles’s “Go ‘Way From My Window.”

Classical training notwithstanding, Lifton-Zoline says that her experience as a teenager at the Putney School, in Vermont, perhaps influenced her musical tastes most vividly. “Every week,” she remembers of her high-school experience, “the entire Putney community – students, faculty, staff” gathered to sing music that ranged from “Bach to chorales, battle songs, hymns and shape notes.”

Shape notes, she explains, are notes with variously shaped heads for singers who don’t read music, but are clued into to intervals between notes “by heads on the notes” in a variety of shapes. “Amazing Grace,” she says, originated as a shape-note hymn.

The Mountain Sprouts fundraiser takes place Thursday, Feb. 19, at the Sheridan Opera House, where doors open at 5 p.m. for complimentary appetizers and a cash bar. Pianist Bob Callendale Israel accompanies Lifton-Zoline in a one-hour performance, starting at 6 p.m. Auction-only tickets are $10; tickets for the evening, at $35, can be bought at the door. Call Robin at 970/519-1441 for more information.