Another serendipitous reunion at the Bard Music Festival: for Saturday night’s concert, who else should be sitting in my row, but Warren Cohen, music director of the MusicaNova Orchestra!

The orchestra is based in Phoenix, Arizona, but Warren makes his home in New Jersey, which is why he was able to make the trip down to the studios of Princeton University’s WPRB, to share with me his experiences with English composer Richard Arnell and his works (of which he has conducted many), for Arnell’s centenary in 2017. It was an all-Arnell morning, which featured several of Warren’s recordings with his orchestra. I feel comfortable stating that Warren is a huge advocate of unusual and neglected repertoire, with a special fondness for English music. Remind you of anyone?

Anyway, here we are during intermission on Saturday, Warren, holding a copy of the lavish Bard Music Festival program, and me, with this year’s tie-in volume of scholarly essays, “Vaughan Williams and His World,” published by University of Chicago Press.

The concert itself was a Vaughan Williams enthusiast’s dream, featuring “Job, A Masque for Dancing” (with projections of William Blake’s artwork), the Concerto for Two Pianos (with soloists Danny Driver and Piers Lane), and the turbulent Symphony No. 4. Leon Botstein conducted The Orchestra Now (TŌN). Good luck ever hearing “Job” in the United States, or the concerto anywhere!

The Bard Music Festival will resume this weekend at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, with a couple of special supplementary events taking place at Church of the Messiah in Rhinebeck on Thursday evening and Friday afternoon.

Impending highlights from Bard’s marathon programs will include Vaughan Williams’ “Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus,” “Flos Campi,” and “The Lark Ascending” (alongside works by Edward Elgar, Grace Williams, Peter Warlock, Frederick Delius, and Gustav Holst, on Friday evening), the String Quartet No. 2 (alongside works by Gordon Jacob, Robert Müller-Hartmann, Egon Wellesz, Arnold Bax, Howard Ferguson, Béla Bartók, Edmund Rubbra, and a Bach transcription by Harriet Cohen, on Saturday afternoon), the Symphony No. 8 and “Sinfonia Antartica” (alongside works by Elizabeth Maconchy, William Walton, and Jean Sibelius, on Saturday evening), the Violin Sonata in A minor (alongside works by Ruth Gipps, Michael Tippett, Samuel Barber, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, and Constant Lambert, on Sunday morning), and the Falstaff opera “Sir John in Love” (Sunday afternoon).

Some of the concerts will be livestreamed. You’ll find the complete schedule here:

https://fishercenter.bard.edu/whats-on/programs/bard-music-festival/

Fisher Center at Bard

Warren Cohen conducts Richard Arnell’s Symphony No. 4:

Warren joins me in 2017 to talk about Arnell on WPRB:

MusicaNova’s website:

https://musicanovaaz.org/

Who else will I encounter at Bard?