“Part boot camp for the brain, part spa for the spirit.”
              – New York Times

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.— Named “a highlight of the musical year” by the Wall Street Journal, the world-renowned Bard Music Festival returns to celebrate its 25th anniversary season in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, crowning Bard SummerScape 2014 with a two-week, in-depth, illuminating exploration of “Schubert and His World.” Twelve concert programs over the two mid-August weekends, complemented by pre-concert lectures, panel discussions, special events, and expert commentary, make up Bard’s examination of Franz Schubert (1797–1828), one of the most revered and influential composers of the Western tradition.

Considering Schubert both as he was known in his lifetime and as posterity has come to understand him, Weekend 1, “The Making of a Romantic Legend” (Aug 8–10), offers an immersion in Schubert’s Vienna, contextualizing the composer’s early life and career within the contradictions of his native city, while Weekend 2, “A New Aesthetics of Music” (Aug 15–17), addresses the nature of Schubert’s originality and of his subsequent legacy and influence. Enriched by a wealth of music from his predecessors, contemporaries, and musical descendants, this Silver Jubilee season serves as a fitting reminder of just how much the Bard Music Festival has done, since its founding in 1990, to revitalize the classical concert experience.

As the New York Times observes, “The Bard Music Festival has managed more than its fair share of ambitious feats in its immersive annual examinations of classical music’s major composers,” offering a “rich web of context” for a full appreciation of that composer’s inspirations and significance. Drawing on recent scholarship, the festival’s thematic programming, multi-disciplinary approach, and emphasis on context and reception history make for a depth and breadth of cultural discovery that appeals to classical music novices and aficionados alike. Since its inception a quarter-century ago, the Bard Music Festival and its co-founder and co-artistic director Leon Botstein have infused the standard concert repertory with a host of important rediscoveries. As the New Yorker’s Alex Ross puts it, “Bard SummerScape and Bard Music Festival always unearth piles of buried treasure.” The New York Times agrees: “Wherever there is an overlooked potential masterpiece, Leon Botstein is not too far behind.” And while the Bard Music Festival’s pioneering approach to thematic programming has sometimes been emulated, “Nothing quite compares to the fascinating summer programs popping out of Leon Botstein’s brain” (Bloomberg News).

Now in his 21st year as music director of the resident American Symphony Orchestra, Maestro Botstein will lead the ensemble in all of the Bard Music Festival’s orchestral programs. As in previous seasons, choral works will feature the Bard Festival Chorale directed by James Bagwell, and vocal and chamber programs will boast an impressive roster of guest artists. All events will take place in the striking Frank Gehry-designed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on Bard College’s glorious Hudson River campus.

Through the prism of Franz Schubert’s life and career, this year’s festival explores the native city with which he is so closely identified. Vienna was the site of an enduring grandeur, but also a city where cozy Biedermeier domesticity would soon succumb to Romanticism, and where artistic restraint was as much a function of Metternich’s police state as of bourgeois respectability. Such tensions are reflected in Schubert’s art, in which innovation and nostalgia – like the major and minor modes – are always inextricably entwined.

The present year is a fitting one in which to honor the composer, for it marks the bicentennial of his setting of Goethe’s Gretchen am Spinnrade, long recognized as Schubert’s first masterpiece, composed on October 19, 1814; the date has come to be known as the “Birthday of the German Lied.” For the elusive composer once overshadowed by Beethoven and Rossini and best known for his lyrical miniatures, then sentimentalized as shy and lovelorn but surrounded by jovial friends, and more recently cast as a sexually ambiguous subversive who set the course of music history away from Beethoven’s monumental example, the time is ripe for Bard’s scholarly reappraisal.

A wide range of Schubert’s own music will be performed, from the perennially popular songs to the once-favored, now-forgotten Singspiel Die Verschworenen, and from such posthumously canonized masterworks as the “Unfinished” Symphony and String Quintet in C Major to neglected rarities like his opera Fierrabras, which will be heard in a semi-staged performance comprising the festival’s final program. Bard will also present music by Schubert’s predecessors, contemporaries, and musical descendants.

Bard’s twelve musical programs, built thematically and spaced over two August weekends, open with Program 1, “The Legacy of a Life Cut Short,” the first of several all-Schubert events. Combining works from opposite ends of the composer’s all-too-brief career, this performance exploits the festival’s unusual ability to vary the traditional concert format by integrating chamber, vocal, choral, and orchestral works within a single program. The posthumously published Third Symphony, bearing the influence of both Haydn and Rossini, and Gretchen am Spinnrade and Erlkönig, which already reveal Schubert’s gift for multi-layered word painting, are among those dating from his late teenage years. Alongside selections from the dances, songs, and partsongs for which he was best known in his own day, such early works will be juxtaposed with two of the most consummate masterpieces of Schubert’s maturity: the transcendent String Quintet in C Major and the Fantasy in F Minor – written for his student, the Countess Caroline von Esterházy – which ranks among his most original works for piano duet.

Program 2, “From ‘Boy’ to Master: The Path to Erlkönig,” pairs some of Schubert’s early compositions – including a string quartet written to play with his father and brothers – with music by those composers most prevalent in the Vienna of his youth. Many of these were foreign-born, including Rossini, whose operas took the Austrian capital by storm; Gluck, who served at the Habsburg court; and Schubert’s own teacher Salieri, then Vienna’s leading musical authority. Mozart, who famously suspected Salieri of attempting to sabotage his career, also spent his final years in the city. Their varying influences were among those Schubert would synthesize with that of the German song composers he studied in the development of his own soul-stirring yet sophisticated style, as exemplified by the spine-chilling Erlkönig.

The “Unfinished” nature of Schubert’s hauntingly lyrical Symphony in B minor, abandoned six years before his death and first performed only 40 years after it, has given rise to considerable speculation. Bard’s first solely orchestral concert – Program 3, “Mythic Transformations” – presents the “Unfinished” Symphony’s two completed movements together with two movements of an earlier unfinished symphony. Besides Joseph Joachim’s famous orchestration of the “Grand Duo” Sonata, the program also includes orchestrations of Schubert Lieder by Brahms, Webern, and Offenbach. For a comparative contrast there will be orchestrations of Erlkönig by Berlioz and Liszt.

Although several of Schubert’s predecessors, like Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, and Carl Friedrich Zelter, wrote accomplished German Lieder, it was he who elevated the genre to an art form, and unlike Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven it would occupy a central place in his oeuvre. Like such later exponents of the genre as Loewe, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Wolf, Schubert and his contemporaries often drew on texts by Goethe, Germany’s foremost lyric poet. In Program 4, “Goethe and Music: The German Lied,” Bard mines this rich vein, with a vocal recital accompanied by expert commentary from Susan Youens, whose numerous publications on the composer include Schubert’s Poets and the Making of Lieder.

It was probably in late 1822 that Schubert first experienced symptoms of the syphilis that cast a shadow on his last six years. In its second all-Schubert concert, Program 5, “Before Unspeakable Illness,” Bard presents works from the composer’s early twenties that preceded this traumatic discovery. His famous four-hands Marche militaire has since been paraphrased by Liszt, quoted by Stravinsky, and featured in the animated Disney short Santa’s Workshop. The “Wanderer” Fantasy, based on Schubert’s own Lied of the same name, is widely considered his most technically demanding composition for piano. Another milestone work, the Quartettsatz, intended to serve as the first movement of his unfinished string quartet, was only premiered and published posthumously under the auspices of Brahms, despite being one of the first examples of Schubert’s mature style.

Convinced that opera would bring the fame and fortune that eluded him, Schubert attempted more than a dozen works for the stage. One of the few to achieve any degree of success is Die Verschworenen (“The Conspirators,” 1823); although during his lifetime its title led to prohibition at the hands of the censors, the one-act Singspiel enjoyed a brief spell of popularity in the 1860s. With a libretto derived from Aristophanes’s satire Lysistrata, Die Verschworenen is a sparkling, attractively scored comedy that betrays little sign of the composer’s illness or distress at the time of its creation. In Program 6, “Schubert and Viennese Theater,” Bard concludes the festival’s opening weekend with a double bill of rarities, pairing a concert performance of Die Verschworenen with the first American presentation of another long-forgotten Viennese favorite: Franz von Suppé’s operetta Franz Schubert (1864), a hit in its day, which incorporates Schubert’s own melodies into a loosely biographical piece depicting – with considerable artistic license – the inspiration behind the songs of Die schöne Müllerin.

Program 7, “Beethoven’s Successor?” will be the inaugural event of Weekend Two, in which Bard offers an historic recreation of the sole public concert that Schubert devoted entirely to his own music. Having served as torchbearer in Beethoven’s funeral procession, Schubert was perhaps hoping the older composer’s compositional torch might now pass to him, and presented his concert on the first anniversary of Beethoven’s death: March 26, 1828. With the profound Piano Trio in E-flat as its centerpiece, Schubert’s program showcased some of his finest recent work. As well as a selection of his most ambitious Lieder and partsongs, this included the opening movement of his bittersweet new string quartet, “Der Tod und das Mädchen” (“Death and the Maiden”), which would live in posterity as one of the cornerstones of the chamber repertoire. The concert was a popular, critical and financial success that the composer – unaware that he had less than eight months to live – hoped to repeat each year.

If Schubert’s contemporaries were prone to overlook his large-scale instrumental works, the modern tendency has been, conversely, to privilege them at the expense of the lighter, more social fare for which he was once best known. In Program 8, “The Music of Friendship,” Bard seeks to redress this balance with examples of works by Schubert and his circle for domestic, amateur performance. Male partsongs like his Gondelfahrer and Grab und Mond would have been sung by convivial foursomes dubbed “the Biedermeier equivalent of the barbershop quartet,” while dances like those by Josef Lanner and Schubert’s own Valses nobles were essentially “Ländler,” Austro-German folkdances earmarked for entertainment at social gatherings. Other composers in Schubert’s circle included Benedict Randhartinger, Josef Lanner, his older brother Ferdinand Schubert, the music publisher Maximilian Leidesdorf, and Schubert’s close friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner, whose recollections of the composer constitute a valuable but sometimes unreliable document in Schubertian biographical studies.

As he neared his end, Schubert turned to the past for inspiration, as Program 9, “Late Ambitions,” reveals. Two choral works dating from his final year reflect Schubert’s growing interest in counterpoint and the Baroque. Set to a poem by his friend Franz Grillparzer, Miriams Siegesgesang (“Miriam’s Song of Victory”) recalls the Handel oratorio Israel in Egypt, while his Mass in E-flat – Schubert’s final setting of the service – draws on the contrapuntal mastery of Bach’s fugues, besides evoking both Beethoven’s Missa solemnis and Mozart’s Requiem in the darkness of its vision. A third sacred work from Schubert’s last year is the a cappella Psalm 92; his only composition in Hebrew, it was written for the legendary cantor Salomon Sulzer, whose presence in Vienna testifies to the fact that the city, though repressive, was marked by increasing tolerance towards the Jewish community. In his final months, Schubert began a tenth symphony that survives only in piano sketches. Rounding out Bard’s program is Luciano Berio’s Rendering (1989-90); cast in three movements for full orchestra, it takes as its structure the fragmentary score of the unfinished D-major symphony, attempting to complete the gaps with Schubertian motifs and quotations from the surviving manuscript.

Schubert’s interest in counterpoint led to a lesson with the theorist and pedagogue Simon Sechter, which was to have been the first of many. Although rarely programmed today, Sechter remains perhaps the most prolific composer of all time. Unsurprisingly, then, his output includes music for male choir. As Program 10, “Fellowship of Men: The Male Choral Tradition,” discovers, secular choral singing played a key role in 19th-century Austro-German culture, and male choirs in particular served as civic bastions of national sentiment. In his youth, Schubert copied and studied male partsongs by Haydn’s younger brother Michael, and he himself went on to write more than a hundred songs for male-voice choir. Two more of Sechter’s illustrious students, Franz Lachner and Bruckner – who would succeed Sechter as professor at the Vienna Conservatory – also composed for male choir, as did Heinrich Marschner, whose unaccompanied choruses were especially popular; Jan Kalivoda, whose Deutsches Lied for male chorus came to serve as an unofficial anthem for Germans in Bohemia; Mendelssohn and Schumann, who both wrote for German Liedertafeln (“Singing Societies”); and Brahms, whose Five Songs for Male Chorus – looking to medieval polyphony and folksong for inspiration – are as finely-wrought as his better-known choral works.

Even in his final months, Schubert was highly productive, creating some of his most important mature masterpieces. Program 11, “The Final Months,” features his last composition for piano four hands, the Rondo in A major, and the incomparable Piano Sonata in A Major, D959; harrowing and uplifting by turns, this is the second of his last three piano sonatas which, though initially overlooked, now represent a core staple of the recital repertoire. Three of Schubert’s last songs complete the program: the pastoral, virtuosic Der Hirt auf dem Felsen for soprano, clarinet, and piano; Taubenpost, with which the posthumously assembled cycle Schwanengesang concludes; and the famous Heine setting that precedes it, Der Doppelgänger. Through-composed yet drawing on techniques from the past, and harking back to the Gothic tales of Schubert’s youth while anticipating Freud in its focus on duality and the uncanny, Der Doppelgänger stands alone, a testament to the scope and vision of its creator.

Of the stage works Schubert completed, only three were mounted in his lifetime. Even Fierrabras (1823), for which – with a libretto by the general manager of one of Vienna’s theaters – there were grounds for hope, was only posthumously premiered during the Schubert centennial celebrations. The problem was partly Weber’s Euryanthe (of which SummerScape presents a rare U.S. revival this season); because Weber’s attempt to compose grand Romantic opera in German had proved a commercial failure, it was feared that Schubert’s would follow suit. Yet Fierrabras, the story of a fictitious Saracen knight at the time of Charlemagne, has since found a following; at its 1988 Austrian premiere, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung declared that, “against the judgment of history,” it had been “triumphantly rescued” at last. In Program 12, “Schubert and Opera,” Leon Botstein leads a semi-staged performance of Schubert’s neglected greatest opera, drawing the 25th anniversary Bard Music Festival – and, indeed, the entire seven weeks of Bard SummerScape – to a gripping close.

Besides the festival’s twelve programs, special events will investigate “The Song Cycle as Drama: Winterreise,” “Schubert on Film,” “The ‘Path toward a Grand Symphony’: Schubert’s Octet,” and “Schubert’s Kosegarten Liederspiel.” Two free panel discussions – “Invention and Reinvention: Who Was Schubert?” and “Music’s ‘Far Fairer Hopes’: Originality and Influence” – will be supplemented by informative pre-concert talks to illuminate each program’s themes. These pre-concert talks are free to ticket-holders and, as has become traditional, the first of them will be given by Maestro Botstein himself. Program Four, “Goethe and Music: The German Lied,” will be presented with expert commentary by Susan Youens.

Since the founding of the Bard Music Festival with “Brahms and His World” in 1990, Princeton University Press has published a companion volume of new scholarship and interpretation each season, with essays and translated documents relating to the featured composer and his world. Scholars-in-Residence Christopher H. Gibbs, author of The Life of Schubert and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, and Morten Solvik, director of IES Abroad Vienna, are the editors of the upcoming 2014 volume, Franz Schubert and His World.

Described as “the summer’s most stimulating music festival” by the Los Angeles Times, and named “one of New York’s premier summer destinations for adventurous music lovers” by the New York Times, the Bard Music Festival has impressed critics worldwide. On his blog, New York Times journalist Steve Smith confesses:

“For an unrepentant music geek like me, the Bard Music Festival is simply irresistible: a fabulous wealth of music by a major composer from the classical tradition, surrounded and contextualized with works by forebears, peers, colleagues, friends, enemies, students, followers – you name it.”
 
The New York Times reports that “performers engaged by Bard invariably seem energized by the prospect of extending beyond canonical routine, and by an audience that comes prepared with open ears and open minds” for the “two-weekend musicological intensive doubling as a sumptuous smorgasbord of concerts.” As the Wall Street Journal’s Barrymore Laurence Scherer observes:


“The Bard Music Festival … no longer needs an introduction. Under the provocative guidance of the conductor-scholar Leon Botstein, it has long been one of the most intellectually stimulating of all American summer festivals and frequently is one of the most musically satisfying. Each year, through discussions by major scholars and illustrative concerts often programmed to overflowing, Bard audiences have investigated the oeuvre of a major composer in the context of the society, politics, literature, art, and music of his times.”


Getting to the Bard Music Festival: New York City Round-Trip Bus Transportation
A round-trip bus service is provided exclusively to ticket-holders for the performances listed below. Reservation is required, and may be made by calling the box office at 845-758-7900. The newly reduced round-trip fare is $20, and the bus departs from Lincoln Center at the times indicated:


Program 1: Friday, August 8 at 8 pm (preconcert talk at 7:30 pm) 3:30 pm
Program 6: Sunday, August 10 at 5:30 pm (preconcert talk at 5 pm) 1:30 pm
Program 7: Friday, August 15 at 8 pm (preconcert talk at 7:30 pm) 3:30 pm
Program 12: Sunday, August 17 at 4:30 pm (preconcert talk at 3:30 pm) 12:00 pm
 

Further details are available at fishercenter.bard.edu/transportation.


Bard’s sensationally popular European Spiegeltent will be open for lunch and dinner throughout “Schubert and His World,” besides playing host to the Bard Music Festival Opening Night Dinner on Friday, August 8.


Program details of Bard Music Festival, “Schubert and His World”

WEEKEND ONE: The Making of a Romantic Legend

Friday, August 8

PROGRAM ONE

The Legacy of a Life Cut Short

Sosnoff Theater

7:30 pm Pre-concert Talk by Leon Botstein

8 pm Performance: Paul Appleby, tenor; Deanna Breiwick, soprano; Dover Quartet and guest; Tyler Duncan, baritone; Nicholas Phan, tenor; Anna Polonsky, piano; Rebecca Ringle, mezzo-soprano; Orion Weiss, piano; members of the American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director

 

Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

   Gretchen am Spinnrade, D118 (1814)

   Overture to Der vierjährige Posten, D190 (1815)

   Symphony No. 3 in D, D200 (1815)

   Fantasy in F minor for piano duet, D940 (1828)

   String Quintet in C, D956 (1828)

   Dances, songs, and partsongs


Tickets starting at $25

 

Saturday, August 9

PANEL ONE

Invention and Reinvention: Who Was Schubert?

Christopher H. Gibbs, moderator; Leon Botstein; and others

Olin Hall

10 am–noon


Free and open to the public

 

PROGRAM TWO

From “Boy” to Master: The Path to Erlkönig

Olin Hall

1 pm Pre-concert Talk: TBA

1:30 pm Performance: Dover Quartet; Andrew Garland, baritone; Sari Grubert, soprano; Julie Pilant, horn; Anna Polonsky, piano; Rebecca Ringle, mezzo-soprano; Orion Weiss, piano; and others

Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

   String Quartet in B-flat, D112 (1814)

   Erlkönig, D328 (1815)

   Songs, dances, and partsongs

Arias, songs, and other works by Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–87), Antonio Salieri (1750–1825), Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752–1814), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91), Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg (1760–1802), Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758–1832), Carl Czerny (1791–1857), and Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868)

Tickets: $35


SPECIAL EVENT

The Song Cycle as Drama: Winterreise

Olin Hall

5 pm Performance: Tyler Duncan, baritone; Erika Switzer, piano


Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

   Winterreise, D911 (1827)


Tickets: $35


PROGRAM THREE

Mythic Transformations

Sosnoff Theater

7 pm Pre-concert Talk: Christopher H. Gibbs

8 pm Performance: Rebecca Ringle, mezzo-soprano; Andrew Schroeder, baritone; American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director


Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

   Symphony No. 8 in B minor, “Unfinished,” D759 (1822)

   Sonata in C, “Grand Duo,” D812 (1824; orch. Joseph Joachim, 1855)

   Selections from Symphony in E Major, D729 (1821; orch. Felix Weingartner, 1934)

   Songs, orch. Hector Berlioz (1803–69); Franz Liszt (1811–86); Jacques Offenbach (1819–80); Johannes Brahms (1833–97); and Anton Webern (1883–1945)

Tickets starting at $25


Sunday, August 10


PROGRAM FOUR

Goethe and Music: The German Lied

Olin Hall

10 am Performance with commentary by Susan Youens; with Teresa Buchholz, mezzo-soprano; Judith Gordon, piano; and others

Songs by Franz Schubert (1797–1828); Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809); Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752–1814); Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91); Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg (1760–1802); Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827); Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758–1832); Carl Loewe (1796–1869), Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47); Robert Schumann (1810–56); and Hugo Wolf (1860–1903)


Tickets: $30


PROGRAM FIVE

Before Unspeakable Illness

Olin Hall

1 pm Pre-concert Talk: Byron Adams

1:30 pm Performance: Danny Driver, piano; Dover Quartet; Benjamin Hochman, piano; Jennifer Koh, violin; and others


Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

   Violin Sonata in D Major, D384 (1816)

   Quartettsatz, D703 (1820)

   Marche militaire, D733 (?1818)

   Fantasy in C, “Wanderer,” D760 (1822)

   Selections from 36 Originaltänze (Erste Walzer), D365 (1818–21)

   Songs

   Partsongs


Tickets: $35


PROGRAM SIX

Schubert and Viennese Theater

Sosnoff Theater

5 pm Pre-concert Talk: Morten Solvik

5:30 pm Performance: Paul Appleby, tenor; Deanna Breiwick, soprano; Ryan Speedo Green, bass-baritone; Cecelia Hall, mezzo-soprano; Nicholas Phan, tenor; Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director; members of the American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director; and others


Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

   Die Verschworenen, Singspiel in one act, D787 (1823)

Franz von Suppé (1819–95)

   Franz Schubert, operetta in one act (1864)


Tickets starting at $25


WEEKEND TWO: A New Aesthetics of Music


Friday, August 15

SPECIAL EVENTS

The “Path toward a Grand Symphony”: Schubert’s Octet

László Z. Bitó ’60 Conservatory Building

3 pm Performance: Faculty and students of The Bard College Conservatory of Music

Tickets: $20


Schubert’s Kosegarten Liederspiel

László Z. Bitó ’60 Conservatory Building

5 pm Performance: Commentary by Morten Solvik; with Paul Appleby, tenor; Deanna Breiwick, soprano; Rebecca Ringle, mezzo-soprano; Reiko Uchida, piano


Tickets: $20

 

Schubert on Film

For locations and times, please visit www.fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf

 

Free and open to the public

 

 

PROGRAM SEVEN

Beethoven’s Successor?

Sosnoff Theater

7:30 pm Pre-concert Talk: Christopher H. Gibbs

8 pm Performance: Paul Appleby, tenor; Horszowski Trio; Andrew Schroeder, baritone; Sarah Shafer, soprano; Brian Zeger, piano; members of the Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director; and others

 

Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

   First Movement from String Quartet in D minor, D810 (1824)

   Fragment aus dem Aeschylus, D450 (1816)

   Die Allmacht, D852 (1825)

   Der Wanderer an den Mond, D870 (1826)

   Schlachtgesang, D912 (1827)

   Ständchen, D920 (1827)

   Piano Trio in E-flat, D929 (1827)

   Der Kreuzzug, D932 (1827)

   Die Sterne, D939 (1828)

   Auf dem Strom, D943 (1828)

 

Tickets starting at $25

 

Saturday, August 16

 

PANEL TWO

Music’s “Far Fairer Hopes”: Originality and Influence

Morten Solvik, moderator; John M. Gingerich; Kristina Muxfeldt; Richard Wilson

Olin Hall

10 am–noon

 

Free and open to the public

 

PROGRAM EIGHT

The Music of Friendship

Olin Hall

1 pm Pre-concert Talk: John M. Gingerich

1:30 pm Performance: Laura Flax, clarinet; Marc Goldberg, bassoon; Benjamin Hochman, piano; Horszowski Trio; Piers Lane, piano; Rebecca Ringle, mezzo-soprano; and others


Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

   Gondelfahrer, D809 (1824)

   Abschied von der Erde, D829 (1826)

   Widerspruch, D865 (1826)

   Grab und Mond, D893 (1826)

   Zur guten Nacht, D903(1827)

   Selections from 12 Waltzes (Valses nobles), D969 (1827)

Works by Ferdinand Schubert (1794-1859); Anselm Hüttenbrenner (1794–1868); Josef Lanner (1801–43); Benedict Randhartinger (1802–93); Franz Lachner (1803–90); Maximilian Leidesdorf (1787–1840); and others


Tickets: $35


PROGRAM NINE

Late Ambitions

Sosnoff Theater

7 pm Pre-concert Talk: Walter Frisch

8 pm Performance: Paul Appleby, tenor; Andrew Garland, baritone; Rebecca Ringle, mezzo-soprano; Sarah Shafer, soprano; Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director; American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director

 

Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

   Miriams Siegesgesang, D942 (1828)

   Mass in E-flat, D950 (1828)

   Psalm 92, D953 (1828)

Luciano Berio (1925–2003)

   Rendering (1990)


Tickets starting at $25


Sunday, August 17


PROGRAM TEN

Fellowship of Men: The Male Choral Tradition

Olin Hall

10 am Performance: Members of the Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director


Works by Franz Schubert (1797–1828); Michael Haydn (1737–1806); Simon Sechter (1788–1867); Heinrich Marschner (1795–1861); Jan Kalivoda (1801–66); Franz Lachner (1803–90); Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47); Robert Schumann (1810–56); Johannes Brahms (1833–97); Anton Bruckner (1824–96); and others

Tickets: $30

 

PROGRAM ELEVEN

The Final Months

Olin Hall

1 pm Pre-concert Talk: Scott Burnham

1:30 pm Performance: Deanna Breiwick, soprano; Laura Flax, clarinet; Piers Lane, piano; Anna Polonsky, piano; Orion Weiss, piano


Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

   Rondo in A for piano four hands, D951 (June 1828)

   Der Doppelgänger, D957/13 (August 1828)

   Piano Sonata in A, D959 (September 1828)

   Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, D965 (October 1828)

   Die Taubenpost, D965 A (October 1828)


Tickets: $35

 

PROGRAM TWELVE

Schubert and Opera

Sosnoff Theater

3:30 pm Pre-concert Talk: Michael P. Steinberg

4:30 pm Performance: Eric Barry, tenor; Eric Halfvarson, bass-baritone; Cecelia Hall, mezzo-soprano; Sara Jakubiak, soprano; Joseph Kaiser, tenor; Andrew Schroeder, baritone; Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director; American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director, and others


Franz Schubert (1797–1828)

   Fierrabras, D796 (1823)


Tickets starting at $25


Bard SummerScape ticket information:

For tickets and further information on all SummerScape events, call the Fisher Center box office at 845-758-7900 or visit www.fishercenter.bard.edu. Fisher Center members receive priority access to the best seats in advance, and those who join the Center’s email list receive advance booking opportunities as well as regular news and updates.

Bard SummerScape: fishercenter.bard.edu/summerscape/2014

Bard Music Festival: fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf/2014


Tickets: [email protected]; or by phone at 845-758-7900.


Updates: Bard’s “e-members” get all the news in regular updates.  Click here to sign up, or send an e-mail to [email protected].

All program information is subject to change.

The 25th annual Bard Music Festival is made possible in part through the generous support of the Board of the Bard Music Festival and the Friends of the Fisher Center, as well as grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Additional underwriting has been provided by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, James H. Ottaway, Jr., Felicitas S. Thorne, Helen and Roger Alcaly, the Bettina Baruch Foundation, Mrs. Mortimer Levitt, Michelle R. Clayman, Margo and Anthony Viscusi, and the Furthermore Foundation. Special support has also been provided by the Mrs. Mortimer Levitt Endowment Fund for the Performing Arts.


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April 2014