BARD SUMMERSCAPE 2007 SEASON ANNOUNCEMENT
“ELGAR AND HIS WORLD” IS INSPIRATION FOR SEVEN-WEEK SUMMERSCAPE FESTIVAL, OPENING ON JULY 5 WITH NEW DANCE COMMISSION AND CLOSING ON AUGUST 19 WITH THE SECOND WEEKEND OF THE 18TH ANNUAL BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL
SUMMERSCAPE WILL OFFER CONCERTS AND NEW PRODUCTIONS OF WORKS BY ELGAR AND SOME OF HIS MOST IMPORTANT CONTEMPORARIES; HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE A DOUBLE BILL OF ZEMLINSKY OPERAS BASED ON WORKS BY OSCAR WILDE, A DANCE COMMISSION FOR DOUG VARONE, GEORGE BERNARD SHAW’S SAINT JOAN, GILBERT AND SULLIVAN’S THE SORCERER, AND A FILM FESTIVAL OF POSTWAR BRITISH CLASSICS PLUS, BARD’S POPULAR SPIEGELTENT RETURNS AS VENUE FOR CABARET, FAMILY FARE AND MUCH MORE, INCLUDING A NEW SITE-SPECIFIC WORK BY CHOREOGRAPHER SUSAN MARSHALL, COMMISSIONED FOR PERFORMANCE IN THIS LUXURIOUS “TENT OF MIRRORS”
“Seven weeks of cultural delight.”—International Herald Tribune

Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.—The fifth annual Bard SummerScape festival will take place between July 5 and August 19, 2007, on Bard’s idyllic Hudson Valley campus, offering a remarkable series of opera, drama, music, film, cabaret, and other events celebrating “Elgar and his World.” The music of Edward Elgar (1857–1934) is the inspiration for the new dance commission for Doug Varone and Dancers that will open this year’s festivities, and the legacy of Elgar and his contemporaries—including Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and Gilbert and Sullivan—will be explored in compelling new productions featuring celebrated artists from around the world. At the heart of SummerScape’s offerings will be “Elgar and His World”: the 18th annual Bard Music Festival, a far-reaching and illuminating program of concerts, lectures, and symposia held over SummerScape’s final two weekends—August 10–12 and 17–19, with a third weekend slated for October 26–27.

Under its music director, Leon Botstein, the American Symphony Orchestra will be in residence during the seven-week-long SummerScape festival, performing a double bill of one-act operas—new productions of A Florentine Tragedy and The Dwarf—by Alexander von Zemlinsky, as well as a number of concerts featuring music by Elgar and his contemporaries. Among the other highlights of SummerScape 2007: James Bagwell will conduct a resident ensemble in a new production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Sorcerer, directed by Erica Schmidt; Susan Marshall and Company will create a new dance work to be performed in Bard’s Spiegeltent; George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan will receive a new production directed by Gregory Thompson, recipient of England’s coveted Young Vic’s Jerwood Director award; the film series “British Postwar Classics” will feature eleven screen works originally released between 1947 and 1999. The majority of these events will take place in the two theaters of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and celebrated since its opening as a major architectural landmark.

Described by the New Yorker as “one of the major upstate festivals,” SummerScape has been widely acclaimed for its rich, innovative and thought-provoking programming. Travel and Leisure reported, “[At] Bard Summerscape . . . Gehry’s acclaimed concert hall provides a spectacular venue for innovative fare,” while the New York Sun observed, “Bard’s [SummerScape festival] . . . offers one of the best lineups of the summer for fans of any arts discipline.” Newsday called SummerScape “brave and brainy,” while London’s Times Literary Supplement lauded it as “[t]he most intellectually ambitious of America’s summer music festivals.” With “Elgar and His World” as its inspiration and focus, the wide-ranging cultural offerings of SummerScape 2007 will bring a dazzlingly complex, colorful, and fascinating era vividly to life.

Detailed information about the Bard SummerScape 2007 season follows.

BARD SUMMERSCAPE 2007—HIGHLIGHTS BY GENRE

Opera

Under its music director, Leon Botstein, the American Symphony Orchestra will be in residence during the seven-week SummerScape festival, playing for the first combined U.S. staged productions of A Florentine Tragedy and The Dwarf, two one-act operas by Alexander von Zemlinsky. These two remarkable operas are both based on works by the inimitable Oscar Wilde. They will be directed by Olivier Tambosi, founder of Neue Oper Wien, whose acclaimed Metropolitan Opera production of Leoš Janácek’s Jenufa was revived this season. Sets and costumes will be designed by the art team of McDermott and McGough, whose work incarnates a 19th-century aesthetic with modern overtones. Lighting designs will be by Robert Wierzel.

 

A Florentine Tragedy is the story of a merchant who, finding his wife in the arms of a prince, strangles his rival. The Dwarf is based on Wilde’s Birthday of the Infanta, which tells of a Spanish princess’s cruelty to her court dwarf when she forces him to dance at her birthday party, and spurns his naïve advances. These two operas, to be sung in German with English super-titles, merge Wilde’s sardonic wit with Zemlinsky’s opulent Viennese music, itself at times as mordant as the language of the great Anglo-Irish wordsmith.

The Zemlinksy double bill opens on July 27, with additional performances on July 29, and August 2, 4, and 5. The Sunday, July 29 performance will be preceded by an Opera Talk, one of SummerScape’s popular ancillary offerings that illuminate its productions each year. (Sosnoff Theater. Tickets: $35, 55, 85; Thursday performance: $25, 45, 75.)

Among SummerScape’s other musical highlights for 2007 is the second great collaborative triumph of Gilbert and Sullivan, The Sorcerer, directed by Erica Schmidt and conducted by James Bagwell. David Korins designs the sets, with Mattie Ullrich designing the costumes, and David Weiner as lighting designer. How much poorer our musical theater tradition would be without Gilbert’s clever word-magic partnered with Sullivan’s magical and quintessentially English music. In their 1877 Sorcerer, “G&S” portray Alexis, a scion of a noble family who entertains the modern idea that the world would be better off if everyone married for love, with no respect for social class. He visits a magician who introduces himself immortally: “My name is John Wellington Wells / I’m a dealer in magic and spells / In blessings and curses / And ever-filled purses, / In prophecies, witches, and knells!” Wells prepares a love potion for Alexis to pour into the tea of everyone in his village, with ensuing hilarity. Opening night is August 3, with additional performances on August 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12. The August 4 performance will, like the Zemlinsky operas, be preceded by an enlightening Opera Talk. (LUMA Theater. Tickets: $45 general admission.)

Dance

For the past two seasons, SummerScape has opened to great acclaim with dance performances—in 2005 with the Martha Graham Company, and in 2006 with new works performed by the Donna Uchizono Company, with guest artist Mikhail Baryshnikov. In 2007, SummerScape opens with the irresistible work of Doug Varone and Dancers, a New York-based troupe. According to the New York Times, “Varone has produced some of modern dance’s most engrossing works.”  His creations range from dark, ambiguous dramas told through the subtlest of gestures, to whirlwinds of energy that threaten to dissolve into chaos. Varone’s depth of emotion has made him an opera house favorite—for the Metropolitan Opera alone, he has choreographed dances for productions of Berlioz’s Les Troyens, Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps, Strauss’s Salome, and Picker’s An American Tragedy.

For SummerScape 2007’s opening night, Varone applies his classical music experience to a new work, commissioned by Bard’s Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, based on music by Elgar, and performed by a live chamber music ensemble. In addition to performing the July 5 festival opener, Doug Varone and Dancers may be seen on July 6, 7, and 8. (Sosnoff Theater. Tickets $20, 35, 50.)

Susan Marshall and Company is fresh from a 20th anniversary season, crowned by a coveted “Bessie” Award and the revival of the acclaimed work Cloudless. MacArthur Fellow and choreographer Susan Marshall will create a new site-specific dance work to be performed in Bard’s Spiegeltent. The new work—like Doug Varone’s the previous evening—is a Fisher Center commission. It will be performed in the round on a central stage, surrounded by the beveled, mirrored columns and ballooning canopies of the unique Belle Époque Spiegeltent. Susan Marshall’s work is admired by critics and audiences from coast to coast. The San Francisco Examiner reported, “Marshall elevates nontraditional dance movement as far as she can take it, while retaining a strong sense of architecture and preserving an almost palpable emotional edge.” Deborah Jowitt of the Village Voice wrote, “Marshall is immensely talented. I love the combination of formality, emotional heat, and everyday behavior.” A recent review in the New Yorker read, “In Susan Marshall’s work, the grizzled virtues of traditional modern dance—the bare feet, the weightiness, the sincerity—come out looking newborn.”  Susan Marshall and Company’s performances in the Spiegeltent begin on July 6, with additional performances on July 7, 8, 12, 14, and 15. (Spiegeltent. Tickets: $35.)

Drama

Director Gregory Thompson, of Scotland’s Tron Theatre and the London theatrical company AandBC, stages George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan in a new production, with sets and costumes designed by Ellen Cairns. Shaw himself referred to the heroine of what many consider his greatest play as “the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages.”  Born circa 1412, and burned for heresy, witchcraft, and sorcery at the tender age of 19, Joan of Arc was canonized as a saint in 1920. Shaw’s 1923 play was instrumental in earning him the Nobel Prize two years later. Given his spectacular reputation as a freethinker and assassin of sacred cows, many feared that Shaw would satirize Joan or portray her as a fraud. Instead, without romanticizing her as a victim or tragic heroine, he paints her as a human being of unparalleled vision, courage, confidence, and imagination.

According to London’s Evening Standard, Gregory Thompson “has been quietly creating spellbinding theatre for years now.”  He has led Glasgow’s acclaimed Tron Theatre since August 2006 and in 1998 founded the AandBC theatre company. Under his leadership, AandBC continues to create innovative theater, re-visiting classical texts with the aim of making them more accessible, and combining vivid physical imagery and live original music to create truly vibrant performances. Performances of Saint Joan in the Fisher Center’s LUMA Theater are scheduled for July 12–15 and 19–22. (LUMA Theater. Tickets: $45 general admission.)

Music

The eleven programs that comprise the 18th annual Bard Music Festival, “Elgar and His World,” will take place during SummerScape’s last two weekends—August 10–12 and August 17–19, with an autumnal finale on October 26–27. With its lavish menu of thematically organized concerts, lectures, panels, and discussions, the Bard Music Festival is internationally renowned. Each season, its unrivaled, in-depth exploration of the life and works of a single composer and his contemporaries, offers, in the words of one New York Times critic, a “rich web of context” for fully appreciating that composer’s influences and impact. This year’s offerings will include music by nearly three dozen composers—featuring instrumental, chamber, orchestral, and choral works written for the church, concert stage, and music hall—as well as scholarly insight from important musicological figures.

Edward Elgar (1857–1934) was the first English composer of international importance since Henry Purcell (1659–95), and is the first British composer to be explored in detail by the Bard Music Festival. A controversial figure within the English musical establishment of his day, Elgar was initially excluded from the closed world of Victorian Society because of his “humble” origins (his father had a music store and was, therefore, of the “merchant class”) and his non-establishment Roman Catholic religion. Elgar was one of the most successful autodidacts in the history of music, virtually a self-taught composer, who mastered many of the instruments in his father’s shop, and earned a living as a church musician until his secular compositions became successful. Initially a composer with a modest provincial reputation in Worcester and environs, he became practically an overnight success after the first performance of his “Enigma” Variations in 1899. He proceeded to secure a preeminent position in British musical life.

 

The Bard Music Festival will examine Elgar as a composer whose music uniquely expressed the Zeitgeist of a complicated society and era. Elgar provides a nexus for a searching investigation of musical and societal developments in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. His class status, along with his vacillating religious beliefs and evolving aesthetics, invite consideration of his music and personality through the prism provided by revisionist history, psychology, and culture. Elgar’s world is not just that of Wagner, Brahms, Fauré, and Strauss—and such younger British colleagues as Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton, and Arthur Bliss—but also includes such luminaries as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, John Singer Sargent, and Siegfried Sassoon. Music for full orchestra and chorus (The Dream of Gerontius closes the Festival), for solo piano, for brass band, string orchestra, solo voice, and everything between, will be performed.

Works by dozens of composers have been programmed—including a host of English contemporaries of Elgar ranging from William Sterndale Bennett,Charles Villiers Stanford, and Hubert Parry to Arthur Sullivan, Percy Grainger, Ethel Smyth, and William Walton. The fact that Elgar’s music was appreciated abroad almost exclusively in Germany makes the inclusion of such composers as Felix Mendelssohn and Richard Strauss especially appropriate. The music of France, so greatly admired by Elgar, is represented with works by Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy. Patrons of the Bard Music Festival are familiar with its multi-disciplinary approach to the matter at hand, with its astonishing array of resident and visiting musicians, panel discussions, symposia, pre-concert lectures by scholars and experts, and concerts. Programs are organized by topics such as “Elgar: from Autodidact to Master of the King’s Musick,” “Music in the Era of Queen Victoria,” and “Das Land ohne Musik?: Views of British Music in the 19th Century.”

As for each Bard Music Festival since 1990, Princeton University Press will publish a volume of new scholarship and interpretation. Byron Adams, scholar in residence for this year’s festival, is editor of Elgar and His World, the 18th in the award-winning series.

Reviewing the final weekend of last year’s Bard Music Festival, the New York Times reported, “As impressive as many of the festival performances were, they were matched by the audience’s engagement: strangers met and conversed, analyzing the music they’d heard with sophistication, and a Sunday-morning panel discussion of gender issues in 19th-century culture drew a nearly full house. All told, it was a model for an enlightened society.”

A detailed schedule for the 18th annual Bard Music Festival can be found below. Additional information is available at www.fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf.

Film

Bard SummerScape’s 2007 Film Series, “British Postwar Classics,” will feature eleven screen works released between 1947 and 1999. This season’s film series principally celebrates a remarkable period in the history of British cinema: the decade immediately following the Second World War. As if mirroring a contradictory, post-traumatic mood of relief and disillusionment, the films of that period offer either giddy comedy (as exemplified by the madcap romps and satirical broadsides produced by Ealing Studios) or sardonic tragedy (Carol Reed’s The Third Man, Michael Powell’s Black Narcissus), with little in between. Also included in this series are films that contextualize the featured composer of this summer’s Bard Music Festival, Edward Elgar, within his familiar cultural landmarks. To this end, the rollicking 1999 comedy Topsy Turvy, which is about Gilbert and Sullivan, will be shown.

Alexander Mackendrick’s Tight Little Island and The Maggie open the series on July 8, followed on July 12 by his classic comedy, The Man in the White Suit. On July 15, Basil Dearden’s The Blue Lamp—the “mother of all police films”—will be shown. A trio of Carol Reed’s greatest screen successes—The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, and Outcast of the Islands—screen on July 19, 22, and 26, respectively, and a topper will be Mike Leigh’s hilarious 1999 sleeper hit Topsy Turvy, about Gilbert and Sullivan, on July 29. Black Narcissus on August 2, and The Red Shoes, on August 5 (both by Michael Powell), and David Lean’s great Oliver Twist on August 9, round out the series. (Avery Arts Center. All film tickets: $7.50.)

Bard’s Popular Spiegeltent

In 2007, Bard will bring back the authentic, one-of-a-kind Belgian Spiegeltent that was such a sensation when it was introduced in 2006—the first time one of these fabled Old World structures appeared in America. The Spiegeltent is a hand-hewn pavilion lined with mirrors, built around a theater “in the round.” With its ballooning velvet canopies, ornate bars, teak dance floors, and intimate booths that all offer equal access to the action, Bard’s Spiegeltent will play host to a dazzling array of entertainment throughout the festival, as well as providing a meeting place for drink, food, and celebration. Playing host to four resident companies, the Spiegeltent will be the showplace for new commissions of dance, opera, and a dramatic song cycle, as well as for entertaining examples of contemporary cabaret and Family Fare. SummerScape’s opening night performance by Doug Varone and Dancers on July 5 will be followed by a gala dance party in the Spiegeltent—with English country dancing, Irish ceili, and American square dances.

“SpiegelMaestro” Ken Roht—director of the three hilarious Offenbach operettas at SummerScape 2006—will serve as Master of Ceremonies and be in residence with members of his Orphean Circus, a group described as “a demented blend of low-budget Ziegfeld Follies and an earth-bound Cirque du Soleil.” Highlights of Bard’s many Spiegeltent offerings follow.

Cabaret, and more…

British conceptual artist and Turner Prize winner Martin Creed offers a one-night only “variety” show, presented in conjunction with the CCS Bard Hessel Museum’s opening of the first American survey of his work on July 7. (Tickets: $25.)

One of the most remarkable personalities in Czech music, avant-garde vocalist-violinist Iva Bittova, returns to SummerScape to perform an experimental mix of new music and Moravian folk music on July 13. (Tickets: $25.)

The Los Angeles Times provides an introduction to SpiegelMaestro Roht’s Orphean Circus and their “Orange Star Dinner Show” on July 19 and 21: “Subversive magus Ken Roht and a fabulous service crew dish up a sublime franchise benchmark … the most nourishing spread in town.” (Tickets: $25.)

Acclaimed director Daniel Fish has conceived and directed a new music theater piece specifically for the Spiegeltent, and inspired by Elliott Smith’s remarkable, posthumously released album From a Basement on a Hill. True Love Productions and Daniel Fish (who brought us 2005’s acclaimed Rocket to the Moon), along with a small ensemble of extraordinary performers, transform the privacy, pain, and pop-eccentricity of singer-songwriter Smith’s music into a beautiful and genre-defying theatrical experience. The show, Speaking in Clowns, opens on July 26, with additional performances on July 28 and 29 and on August 3–5. (Tickets: $25.)

After last year’s sold-out run, the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus rolls back into town to set up shop in nearby Hudson, preparing to regale SummerScape audiences with their bag of tricks and inventive Victorian Variety Show, rated “PG13.”  See them on July 27, or bring the family to their “G”-rated show under Family Fare, on July 28 and 29. (Tickets: $25.)

Multidisciplinary artist Carl Hancock Rux, whose work incorporates rap, slam poetry, and the oral traditions of 19th-century slaves, wowed the Spiegeltent audience in 2006. He returns this season with a new opera, The Blackamoor Angel. Working with Downtown jazz composer Deirdre Murray and director Karin Coonrod, Rux uses a Weimar-era traveling circus to tell the story of Angelo Soliman, an African friend of Mozart’s in 18th-century Vienna. This amazing creation will be shown exclusively in Bard’s Spiegeltent for four performances, August 9, 10, 17, and 18. (Tickets: $25.)

Dzul Dance fuses ritual and modern dance with daring aerial maneuvers, transforming bodies into earthbound and airborne forces of nature. The company is an exciting and unique intermarriage of forms, using intense physicality, innovative partnering, and amazing aerial work to bring pre-Hispanic culture to life. A New York Times review reported, “Javier Dzul sent people twisting and turning with remarkable elasticity . . . They made skillful use of devices that turned them into creatures of the air as well as of the earth.” Performances are on August 11 and 12. (Tickets: $25.)

There’s no better place to relive the experience of the 19th-century British music hall than the Spiegeltent. In “God Bless the Music Hall,” Bard celebrates the unique experience with captivating entertainers, saucy songs and dances, and specialty acts. Whether serving to cheer audiences in wartime or to fire them up with imperialist enthusiasm, many of the old music hall forms still resonate today. One night only, August 16. (Tickets: $25.)
While the night is still young, after the regularly scheduled performances of SummerScape, the SpiegelClub is open, with DJs, song and dance, and all manner of good times. Thursdays through Sundays at 10 pm, with no entrance fee.

Family Fare

With its inviting ticket prices—$15 for adults and $5 for children aged twelve and under—Bard’s weekend Family Fare offerings will make the Spiegeltent a popular destination for audiences of all ages.

Kids’ entertainer Audra Tsanos, known as AudraRox, has been rocking out with New York City families for eight years. She’ll bring her “kid rock” band to perform short songs that deal with such crucial kid issues as lost socks and shoes, broken toys, and short attention spans. Two shows, on the afternoon of July 15.

Orphean Circus does double-duty for adults and kids—July 21 and 22 for families—with its creation of an audience-generated music-theater piece.

Bindlestiff Family Cirkus is back in town. Its jugglers, clowns, acrobats, and trapeze artists share the stage with musicians, magicians, dancers, and daredevils on July 28 and 29 (two shows).

Goat on a Boat Music Theater and other groups will also participate in Bard’s weekend Family Fare Saturdays and Sundays. More to be arranged.

PROGRAM DETAILS FOR THE BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL

BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL WEEKEND ONE

August 10–12, 2007

Grandeur and Intimacy in Victorian England

Friday, August 10

Program One: Elgar: From Autodidact to “Master of the King’s Musick”

Sosnoff Theater

7:30 pm        Preconcert Talk: Leon Botstein

8:00 pm        Performance: Daedalus Quartet; Piers Lane, piano; Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director; members of the American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director

 

Edward Elgar (1857–1934)

Sursum Corda for organ, brass, strings, Op. 11

Harmony Music, No. 4

Chanson de nuit, Op. 15, No. 1

Chanson de matin, Op. 15, No. 2

Salut d’amour, Op. 12

Sevillana, Op. 7

Piano Quintet in A Minor, Op. 84

Choral Works

Tickets: $20, $35, $45

Saturday, August 11

Panel One: Elgar the Man and His Worlds

Olin Hall

10:00 am – noon

Christopher H. Gibbs, moderator; Byron Adams, Diana McVeagh, and others

Free and open to the public

 

Program Two: Music in the Era of Queen Victoria

Olin Hall

1:00 pm        Preconcert Talk: Christina Bashford

1:30 pm        Performance: Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director; Bard Festival Chamber Players; Daedalus Quartet; Simone Dinnerstein, piano; Thomas Meglioranza, baritone; Anna Polonsky, piano

 

Edward Elgar (1857–1934)

        O Salutoris Hostia

        Ave verum, Op. 2, No. 1

        Ecce sacerdos magnus

Johann Baptist Cramer (1771–1858)

        Introduzione ed aria all’inglese, Op. 65, for piano

William Sterndale Bennett (1816–75)

        Impromptu, Op. 12, No. 2, for piano; Piano Sextet, Op. 8

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–47),

span style="font-size:12px;">Fantasia for piano in E Major, “The Last Rose of Summer,” Op. 15

Songs and glees by T. F. Walmisley (1783–1866); John Stainer (1840–1901); C. E. Horn (1786–1849); Liza Lehmann (1862–1918); J. L. Hatton (1809–1886); and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900)

Choral works by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy; S. S. Wesley (1810–76); and F. A. Gore Ouseley (1825–89)

Tickets: $35

 

Special Event: Elgar and Anglophilia at the Piano: Elgar, Ireland, and Grainger

Olin Hall

5:00 pm        Performance with commentary by Kenneth Hamilton

Free and open to the public

Program Three: Elgar and the “English Musical Renaissance”

Sosnoff Theater 

7:00 pm        Preconcert Talk: Byron Adams

8:00 pm        Performance: Piers Lane, piano; American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director

Edward Elgar (1857–1934)

In the South (Alassio), Op. 50

Pomp and Circumstance, March No. 4, Op. 39, in G Major

Funeral March from Grania and Diarmid, Op. 42

Variations on an Original Theme (“Enigma”), Op. 36

Hubert Parry (1848–1918),

Symphonic Variations

Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924),

Concert Variations on an English Theme (“Down among the Dead Men”) for piano and orchestra, Op. 71

Tickets: $25, $40, $55

 

Sunday, August 12

Panel Two: Das Land ohne Musik?: Views of British Music in the 19th Century

Olin Hall

10:00 am – noon

Christina Bashford, moderator; Kenneth Hamilton, Barrymore Scherer, and Richard Wilson

Free and open to the public

 

Program Four: Elgar and the Victorian Spirit

Olin Hall

1:00 pm        Preconcert Talk: Christopher Fifield

1:30 pm        Performance: Bard Festival Chamber Players; Claremont Trio; Melvin Chen, piano; William Ferguson, tenor; Weston Hurt, baritone

 

Edward Elgar (1857–1934), Six Songs

Ethel Smyth (1858–1944), Variations on “Sweet Robin,” for flute, oboe, and piano

Arthur Somervel (1863–1937), Six Songs, from Maud

Hubert Parry (1848–1918), Piano Trio in E Minor

Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924), Serenade (Nonet), Op. 95

Tickets: $35

 

Program Five: Imperial Pomp and Pastoral Nostalgia: British Music for Brass and Strings

Sosnoff Theater

4:30 pm        Preconcert Talk: Christopher Fifield

5:30 pm        Performance: Laura Ahlbeck, oboe; Randolph Bowman, flute; Gramercy Brass Orchestra of New York, John Henry Lambert, conductor and music director; Members of the American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director; and others

Edward Elgar (1857–1934)

Civic Fanfare, for brass

Severn Suite, Op. 87

Serenade in E Minor, Op. 20

Introduction and Allegro, Op. 47

Granville Bantock (1868–1946), Symphonic Prelude: Prometheus Unbound

Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Feierlicher Einzug der Ritter des Johanniterordens

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis

Gustav Holst (1874–1934), Fugal Concerto, for flute, oboe, and strings

John Ireland (1879–1962), Comedy Overture

Percy Grainger (1882–1961), Irish Tune from County Derry

Tickets: $25, $40, $55

 

BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL Weekend Two

August 17–19, 2007

From Romanticism to Modernism:

World War I and the End of the Long 19th Century

Friday, August 17

Symposium: Charles Darwin and Cardinal Newman: Religion, Science, and Technology in the Elgarian Era

Multipurpose Room, Bertelsmann Campus Center

10:00 am – noon

1:30 pm – 3:30 pm

 

Deirdre d’Albertis, moderator; and others

Free and open to the public

 

Special Showing: Elgar on Film

Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center

4:00 pm

Free and open to the public

 

Program Six: Elgar and the Salon

Sosnoff Theater

7:30 pm        Preconcert Talk: Sophie Fuller 

8:00 pm        Performance: Sasha Cooke, mezzo-soprano; Jeremy Denk, piano; William Ferguson, tenor; Jupiter String Quartet; Piers Lane, piano

 

Edward Elgar (1857–1934)

Concert Allegro, Op. 46

Dream Children, Op. 43 (arr. for piano)

Echo’s Dance, from The Sanguine Fan, Op. 81 (arr. for piano)

May Song

Skizze

Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924), La bonne chanson, Op. 61

Frank Bridge (1879–1941), Piano Quintet in D Minor

Songs by Maude Valerie White (1855–1937); Ethel Smyth (1858–1944);

Hubert Parry (1848–1918); and Roger Quilter (1877–1953)

Tickets: $20, $35, $45

Saturday, August 18

 

Program Seven: “God Bless the Music Halls”: Victorian and Edwardian Popular Song in America and Britain

Olin Hall

v10:00 am        Performance with commentary by Derek Scott, with Thomas Meglioranza, baritone; and others

Tickets: $30

Program Eight: The Great War and Modern Music

Olin Hall

1:00 pm        Preconcert Talk: Alain Frogley

1:30 pm        Performance: Bard Festival String Quartet; Claremont Trio; Laura Flax, clarinet; Weston Hurt, baritone; Jennifer Koh, violin; Ieva Jokubaviciute, piano; Scott Williamson, tenor

 

Edward Elgar (1857–1934)

Violin Sonata in E Minor, Op. 82

Carillon, Op. 75

Claude Debussy (1862–1918),

Berceuse héroïque, for piano

Noël des enfants qui n’ont plus de maison, for voice and piano

John Ireland (1879–1962), Piano Trio No. 2

Arthur Bliss (1891–1975), Clarinet Quintet

Songs by George Butterworth (1885–1916) and Ivor Gurney (1890–1937)

Tickets: $35

 

Program Nine: Elgar: The Imperial Self-Portrait

Sosnoff Theater

7:00 pm        Preconcert Talk: Christopher H. Gibbs

8:00 pm        Performance: American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director

 

Edward Elgar (1857–1934)

Crown of India Suite, Op. 66

Falstaff, Symphonic Study in C Minor, Op. 68

Sospiri, Op. 70

Symphony No. 2 in E-flat Major, Op. 63  

 

Sunday, August 19

Panel Three: Constructions of Masculinity from Dorian Gray to Father Brown

Olin Hall

10:00 am – noon

 

Byron Adams, moderator; Leon Botstein; Sophie Fuller; and others

Free and open to the public

 

Program Ten: Elgar and Modernism

Olin Hall

1:00 pm        Preconcert Talk: Diana McVeagh

1:30 pm        Performance: Carolyn Betty, soprano; Bard Festival String Quartet; Jeremy Denk, piano; Piers Lane, piano; Sophie Shao, cello; Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director

 

Edward Elgar (1857–1934), String Quartet in E Minor, Op. 83

Frederick Delius (1862–1934), Sonata for cello and piano

Gustav Holst (1874–1934), Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda, Third Group

Cyril Scott (1879–1970), Two Pieces, Op. 47, for piano

Herbert Howells (1892–1983), Piano Quartet in A Minor, Op. 21

William Walton (1902–1983), Three Songs for voice and piano (arranged from Façade)

Tickets: $35

 

Program Eleven: The Culture of Religion: The Dream of Gerontius 

Sosnoff Theater

4:30 pm        Preconcert Talk: Charles McGuire

5:30 pm        Performance: Carolyn Betty, soprano; Vinson Cole, tenor; John Hancock, baritone; Jane Irwin, mezzo-soprano; Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director; American Symphony Orchestra; conducted by Leon Botstein, music director

 

Edward Elgar (1857–1934)

Selections from The Kingdom, Op. 51

The Dream of Gerontius, Op. 38

Tickets: $25, $40, $55

BARD SUMMERSCAPE 2007 EVENTS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

July 5

5:00 pm                          SummerScape Gala Benefit (Spiegeltent)

8:00 pm                          Doug Varone and Dancers (Sosnoff)

10:00 pm                       Gala Opening (Spiegeltent)

 

July 6

5:30 – 7:30 pm               Dinner (Spiegeltent)

8:00 pm                          Doug Varone and Dancers (Sosnoff)

8:30 pm                          Susan Marshall & Company (Spiegeltent)

10:00 pm                        SpiegelClub (Spiegeltent)

 

July 7

3:30 pm                          Susan Marshall & Company (Spiegeltent)

5:30 – 7:30 pm               Dinner (Spiegeltent)

8:00 pm                          Doug Varone and Dancers (Sosnoff)

8:30 pm                          Martin Creed (Spiegeltent)

10:00 pm                        SpiegelClub (Spiegeltent)

 

July 8

3:00 pm                          Doug Varone and Dancers (Sosnoff)

3:30 pm                          Susan Marshall & Company (Spiegeltent)

5:30 – 7:30 pm                Dinner (Spiegeltent)

7:00 pm                          Tight Little Island / The Maggie (Avery)

8:30 pm                          Susan Marshall & Company (Spiegeltent)

10:00 pm                        SpiegelClub (Spiegeltent)

 

July 12

5:30–7:30 pm                  Dinner (Spiegeltent)

7:00 pm                          The Man in the White Suit (Avery)

8:00 pm   &