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Bard Music Festival

Program Six • Sacred Music in France

August 15–16, 2024

Add to Calendar2026-05-19 5:38 am2026-05-19 5:38 amEDTProgram Six • Sacred Music in France
Following the success of last season’s first foray off-campus, the Bard Music Festival returns to nearby Rhinebeck for Program Six. Once again featuring the renovated organ of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah, this program presents a range of religious works in the ecclesiastical environment for which they were written. Organ pieces by masters of the genre Alfred Lefébure-Wély, Camille Saint-Saëns, and Olivier Messiaen will be interspersed with short choral works by Berlioz, Cherubini, Meyerbeer, Fauré, and Dmitry Bortniansky, a Ukrainian who served at the court of Catherine the Great. The program showcases two Romantic compositions that were first presented to the public as rediscoveries from the past: a faux-Renaissance hymn by Pierre-Louis Dietsch and the purportedly 17th-century La fuite en Égypte. Heard here in the original version for tenor, chorus, and chamber orchestra, this was in fact by Berlioz, who later incorporated it into his oratorio L’enfance du Christ.

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