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Bard Music Festival

Program Three • The Sounds of a Nation: Patriotism and Antiquity

August 10

Add to Calendar2024-08-10 7:00 pm2024-08-10 7:00 pmEDTProgram Three • The Sounds of a Nation: Patriotism and AntiquityFisher Center, Sosnoff Theater,
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Program Three offers an orchestral snapshot of mid-19th century France. Originally conceived as the climax of a symphony celebrating Napoleon Bonaparte, Berlioz’s choral setting of the Te Deum hymn is one of his greatest religious works, combining architectural mastery with grandeur of expression.

Les Troyens, his grand opera based on Virgil’s Aeneid, is yet more monumental in scope. An epic tour de force that, to his chagrin, the composer never saw performed complete, the opera is represented here by the “Trojan March,” the tone poem “Royal Hunt and Storm,” and the Merchant of Venice-inspired duet “Nuit d’ivresse et d’extase infinie.”

These share the program with Berlioz’s stirring arrangement of the Marseillaise, the French national anthem, together with overtures by Daniel-François-Esprit Auber and Christoph Willibald Gluck, the composer Berlioz deemed, with Beethoven, one of music’s “two supreme gods.”

Program

6 pm • Preconcert Talk with Sarah Hibberd
7 pm • Performance: with Jana McIntyre, soprano; Megan Moore, mezzo-soprano; Joshua Blue, tenor; Bard Festival Chorale and James Bagwell, choral director; and The Orchestra Now, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director

Hector Berlioz (1803–69)

Hymne de Marseillaise (arr. 1830)

“Trojan March,” “Nuit d’ivresse et d’extase infinie,” and “Royal Hunt and Storm” from Les Troyens (1856–58)

Te Deum, Op. 22/H.118 (1849)

Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–87)

Overture to Iphigenia in Aulis (1774; arr. R. Wagner, 1847)

Daniel-François-Esprit Auber (1782–1871)

Overture to Fra Diavolo (1830)

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