Tackling a topic as vast as the Bard Music Festival can be intimidating. Also, life tends to get in the way, often keeping me from being my best self, particularly in the narrow windows during which my brain is actually firing at peak capacity. All disclaimers aside, let’s see what I can do.
The Bard Music Festival, now in its 35th year, is the crown jewel of Bard SummerScape, an eight-week celebration of the arts, held on the campus of Bard College beginning in late June. The Bard Festival itself, which spans two weekends in August, focuses on certain composers and their worlds – encompassing works by their associates, contemporaries, influences, and those who were influenced by them. The subject’s life and artistry are explored by way of marathon concerts, but also through pre-concert talks, Saturday morning panels with visiting and resident scholars, a book of related essays, and a 70-page festival program booklet which is so much more than a utilitarian compilation of concert listings, lavishly-illustrated and brimming with valuable information about every aspect of the subject.
This year’s focus is the neglected Czech master, Bohuslav Martinů, whose life took him from the comparative isolation of a childhood spent in a provincial bell tower, to a period of lackluster studies in the city of Prague, to an artistic flowering in Paris, to a flight from war and authoritarianism in Europe to safety and recognition in the U.S., to final years spent in Switzerland on the estate of conductor and music patron Paul Sacher. That’s quite a journey, and Martinů was an expert assimilator, sensitive to stimuli from a broad array of influences, all siphoned through a lively, fecund, and voracious sensibility. All converge in his highly unique, multifaceted creations, which are full of human touches, while often seeming to churn with the vitality of a mechanized age.
Alas, Martinů has shared the fate of so many composers who clove to tonality in the 20th century. A multiplicity of factors that contributed to the “Great War” sent strains of decadence and malaise out into the arts. There was a little bit of a reprieve during World War II, when a certain amount of populism was tolerated, in the interest of keeping up the morale of the unwashed. But after two devastating conflicts, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb, arbiters and academics tended to marginalize composers who did not cast off tradition, which they perceived as upholding destructive tendencies, to embrace the brave new world of the avant-garde. Ironically, the sterility of the Ivory Tower was viewed as the only way forward.
Thankfully, we are, for the most part, beyond all that, and composers of Martinů’s generation, who continued to seek new ways within a continuity of tradition and form, are gradually being reassessed. However, the process has been a slow one. Many still get lost in the cracks between the classics and the “new” – younger, trendier composers – while concert programmers wrangle with the challenges of fulfilling their obligations to the living and programming enough Beethoven and Mahler to guarantee a full house.
Bard is in the unique position that it doesn’t have to worry about all that. With Leon Botstein at the helm, fashion and factionalism are shown the door in favor of unbiased inquiry and clear-eyed appreciation. Not only is he insatiably curious, he is also Bard’s president, as he has been for the past 50 years. (He assumed the position at the age of 28!) Botstein serves as co-artistic director of the festival with Christopher H. Gibbs. He is also its music director.
Many of the concerts feature the young players of Bard’s graduate training ensemble, The Orchestra Now, a post-conservatory group of highly-skilled performers. Others feature the American Symphony Orchestra, a professional group founded by none other than Leopold Stokowski, which Botstein has directed since 1992. Soloists and chamber instrumentalists are equally questing, vibrant, and first-rate. Many are long-time Bard associates or faculty. Pianists Piers Lane and Danny Driver have long recorded unusual and neglected repertoire for Hyperion Records, among others. Occasionally, there are genuine “celebrity” guests. I’ve seen Michael York and David Strathairn there. This past weekend, Mahan Esfahani, whose recordings on Hyperion and Deutsche Grammophon have helped develop a world following, was the soloist in Martinů’s Harpsichord Concerto.
Daytime panels and chamber concerts are held in the 300-seat Olin Hall, in Bard’s Franklin W. Olin Humanities Building. Evening concerts are held at the 900-seat Sosnoff Theater in the campus’ Frank Gehry-designed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, which I have often described as a gigantic, reflective armadillo. Under certain conditions, it’s hard to get a good photo, because of the venue’s sleek, reflective surfaces.
My plan today had been to give an account of the festival’s first weekend, but already this is getting a little long. So watch this space! More tomorrow. The Bard Music Festival, “Martinů and His World,” will continue this weekend, with choral, chamber, instrumental, and orchestral works – and even one of Martinů’s 14 operas, “Julietta.”
For more information, visit
Fisher Center at Bard
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