Bard SummerScape

Highlights of the 2006 SummerScape season include the 17th annual Bard Music Festival, “Franz Liszt and His World,” offering a broad range of concerts and symposia that explore Liszt’s extraordinary talents and wide-ranging influence. The festival also provides the context for:

• Genoveva, the first fully staged production of Robert Schumann’s only opera, directed by Kasper Bech Holten, director of the Royal Danish Opera, with Leon Botstein conducting the American Symphony Orchestra;
• two dance premieres by choreographer Donna Uchizono: a SummerScape commission to music by Liszt, paired with the premiere of a new work for dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov, Hristoula Harakas, and Jodi Melnick;
• a triple bill of comic one-act operettas by Jacques Offenbach, directed by the young, inventive choreographer Ken Roht;
• Camille, in a new production based on Neil Bartlett’s adaptation of Alexandre Dumas fils’ La dame aux camélias, directed by Kate Whoriskey; and
• The Films of Max Ophuls. Max Ophuls was the ultimate virtuoso of 20th-century filmmaking. Born in Germany in 1902, he fled to France in 1933 and to the United States in 1940. Ophuls’s films have a sense of style that creates meaning. His camera sways and dances, speeds up and slows down. A maestro of visual splendor, he captures rhythm, mood, and tempo in a single, exquisite shot. No matter where Ophuls worked, his films reflected the same preoccupations: theater and spectacle, music and memory, and the self-conscious struggle of women and idealists.

New this year to SummerScape is the celebrated SpiegelPalais—a luxurious music pavilion dating from the early 1900s. This legendary “tent of mirrors” is the essence of Old-World opulence and will serve as an additional performance venue for cabaret and family fare, as well as a festival club for artists and audiences to gather to share a meal and celebrate SummerScape.