Fresh off the stalk of this year’s Bard Music Festival, it’s Nikolai Rimsky Korn-on-the-kob. Okay, it’s really Rimsky-Korsakov, but after a weekend in rural Upstate New York, how could I resist?

“Rimsky-Korsakov and His World” is the focus of this year’s festival, Bard’s 29th. In classic Bard fashion, artistic co-directors Leon Botstein – president of Bard College, music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, and founder of The Orchestra Now – and musicologist Christopher H. Gibbs have assembled two weekends’ worth of stimulating programs, slanted toward lesser-known repertoire by its subject, his contemporaries, his influences, and those he influenced, with a few of his imperishable classics (“Scheherazade,” the “Russian Easter Festival Overture”) tossed into the mix. Highlights are too many to list, but the festival will conclude its second weekend on Sunday with a concert performance of “The Tsar’s Bride,” one of Rimsky’s 15 operas. How often do we get to hear it?

Join me this afternoon, following today’s Noontime Concert, for some of the repertoire presented on this year’s 29th Annual Bard Music Festival: Rimsky-Korsakov and His World, including Rimsky’s Piano Concerto, Mikhail Glinka’s Sextet in E-flat major, Sergei Taneyev’s Symphony No. 4, and Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” in its original version, which I’ll be featuring in a new recording with Clipper Erickson, piano.

You’ll find more information about this one-of-a-kind festival, which skillfully walks the line between scholarship and entertainment, by visiting fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf/

The music may not be in a hurry, but it’s definitely Russian, this afternoon between 1 and 4 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Next summer’s focus: Erich Wolfgang KORNgold!