It’s summer and a Sunday. As I continue to work on my appreciation of conductor Roger Norrington (who died on Friday), which hopefully I will have in satisfactory shape soon, I thought I’d share this interview with musicologist Byron Adams, conducted by Andrew Green of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society.
Adams, whose comments on this page are invariably illuminating (and always welcome), has been a passionate and lifelong advocate of Vaughan Williams, Elgar, and other British composers. If you ever attend concerts of the Philadelphia Orchestra, pay attention to who wrote the program notes. There’s a possibility it could be Byron!
Adams is also a composer himself, a retired professor of music at the University of California, Riverside. The conversation at the link rightly emphasizes his contribution to the Bard Music Festival, especially in the editing of a tie-in volume of critical essays for the 2023 festival, devoted to “Vaughan Williams and His World,” published by University of Chicago Press. But you may also learn a thing or two about Vaughan Williams’ experiences in America and certainly more about the Bard Music Festival.
Another one of Byron’s enthusiasms and areas of expertise is French music. He’ll be introducing a concert to be performed at Bard on the afternoon August 9 for a program he helped curate, titled “The French Connection,” designed to illuminate the experiences in Paris of – and French influences on – the subject of this year’s festival, the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů. The concert will also include music by Alexandre Tansman, Albert Roussel, Maurice Ravel, and Josef Suk.
Adams is a Bard stalwart, having for many years served on the program committee for the festival.
Here’s a link to the complete schedule for “Martinů and His World,” which will take place at Bard College over two weekends, August 8-10 and 14-17.
Watch the interview to find out which essay in his book drove him to drink!
Fisher Center at Bard
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