I can’t believe it’s been two months already since the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts announced that the focus of this summer’s Bard Music Festival will be “Mozart and His World.” The festival, now in its 36th year, will we be held at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, August 7-16. The fact that I didn’t share the news immediately is attributable to several factors:
Firstly, I’m sorry, Mozart may have been one the greatest musical geniuses who ever lived – and he wrote some music I would never want to be without (e.g. “The Marriage of Figaro,” an opera I like to say basically saved my life, or least got me through a very rough time) – but the idea of two weekends of his music doesn’t exactly thrill me.
In the past, I wouldn’t have considered it an issue, since the “and His World” qualifier ensured there would be plenty of fascinating discoveries by the subject’s contemporaries, those who influenced him, and those he in turn influenced.
Also, historically, Bard has been exceptional in digging deep into composers’ basements and turning up neglected scores from cobwebbed corners of their attics. This year, alas, seems to be a little disappointing in these regards.
For one thing, I was hoping the programs would mix it up a bit more and cast some light into the future. After all, there are so many pieces influenced by or written in tribute to Mozart. One program will include Tchaikovsky’s “Mozartiana” – hardly a rarity, but at least it will be presented in a lesser-heard piano version – though I would expect the concerts to also weave in works such as Jean Françaix’s “Hommage à l’ami Papageno” for wind ensemble or, say, Francis Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos, with its clearly Mozartian slow movement. If not those works specifically, perhaps a few like them.
Of course at Bard, you never know everything you’re going to get until the actual, physical program goes to print. This early in the process, what’s given on the website is frequently but a sketch. But I imagine the major works are in place.
Anyway, for all my grousing, I will be there for at least some of it, and once I am in the concert halls and into the music, I know I will have a good time, regardless, even if I can’t imagine buying a ticket based on being able to hear the “Prague Symphony” again.
Unquestionably, there will be rarities: a Michael Haydn mass, selections from a Salieri opera, a Clementi piano sonata that contains the germ for Mozart’s overture to “The Magic Flute.” But what about the Mozart-Salieri collaboration “Per la Ricuperata Salute di Ofelia,” rediscovered as recently as 2016? How about Rimsky-Korsakov’s one-act opera “Mozart and Salieri?” Or Reynaldo Hahn’s “Mozart?”
As always with these things, people will have their own ideas, and I know I should be thankful for anything this group organizes – and I am! But there’s no way I can pretend to be anywhere near as pumped for a Mozart festival as I was for those devoted to past subjects, such as Prokofiev, Sibelius, Rimsky-Korsakov, Berlioz, Vaughan Williams, Bohuslav Martinů, Carlos Chávez, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
Okay, I’ve been putting it off, but now at last I come to the elephant in the room. I so badly do not want to even address it, but there’s the unfortunate quagmire through which co-artistic director Leon Botstein – also president of Bard College since 1975 – is currently slogging. If you don’t already know it, Botstein is in the Epstein files. Not with anything like the same frequency as the President of the United States, mind you, or, from what we know so far, with anywhere near the same degree of skeeviness. Actually, it doesn’t appear there’s any skeeviness at all. But the timing couldn’t be worse. The excrement hit the fan just before this year’s festival would have to be announced.
The New York Times has covered Botstein’s interactions with Epstein extensively, but a lot of “journalists,” I’ve noticed, in particular those writing for the local papers of the Hudson Valley, seem to have their knives out, through suggestive phraseology and loaded words. The last thing Bard needs, in this sensitive situation, is for anyone to be striking sparks.
I hasten to add, although Botstein is kind of a hero to me, I am in no way discounting the real and lasting trauma experienced by any of Epstein’s victims or that of anyone else who has suffered sexual abuse in their personal lives or at the hands of anyone on the faculty of the college itself (which has been alleged; after all, it is a college, and there are often abuses of authority at such institutions). There have been no allegations of Botstein himself participating in any illegal behavior.
However, one of Epstein’s victims made an interesting point in an interview when she stated that the fact that Epstein was able to attract someone as estimable as Botstein to his sphere – and Botstein is FAR from the only one – it lent to an illusion of legitimacy, so that she and others like her struggled with the disconnect between what they were seeing, this kind of acceptance, and what they were actually experiencing.
But Botstein himself appears to be clean, and the man himself has done so much for not only music, but for education, for social causes, and for the school itself. It would be unfortunate if he were forced out for the sin of trying to elicit additional funds from a millionaire, who made an unsolicited $75,000 donation to the college.
But an independent investigation is ongoing. I will stand by the findings, as I hope the student activists will. There is a group on campus raising hell as only young people can.
Botstein, who is brilliant and brilliantly articulate, is conspicuously absent, or downplayed to the extent that I don’t see him mentioned anywhere in the Bard promotional material. I’m hoping he is not forced out of the festival altogether, as there is no one currently involved that could ever fill his shoes.
He’s still attached to this year’s opera production, which precedes the festival, as part of Bard SummerScape, a larger celebration of the arts that spans June 25-August 16. I already have my ticket to hear him conduct Richard Strauss’ “Die ägyptische Helena” (“The Egyptian Helen”). The opera runs July 24-August 2.
Furthermore, I will hear him at Carnegie Hall this Thursday, with vocal soloists and the American Symphony Orchestra, as he introduces and conducts Berlioz’s rarely-encountered edition of Carl Maria von Weber’s “Der Freischütz.”
One of the reasons I feel so disheartened by my own reaction to this year’s music festival – a reaction that I suspect will be shared by others attracted to Bard for its advocacy of unusual and neglected repertoire – is that I do not want the college to misconstrue my or anyone’s lack of enthusiasm and/or low attendance for distaste for, or protest against, Botstein.
Be that as it may, you’ll find the program, as it currently stands, at the links below. If you’re a Mozart nut, I hope you will consider attending.
Long live the Bard Music Festival. I’m hoping we’ll still have a few more years of Botstein, who will turn 80 in December, but appears to be as vital as ever, and in comparatively good health, at least on the evidence of what I’ve seen at Bard and at his concerts in New York City.
Next year, another neglected or underappreciated composer, please!
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Bard Music Festival
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/what-we-do/bard-music-festival/
Bard SummerScape, including Strauss’ “The Egyptian Helen”
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/what-we-do/summerscape/
Tag: Bard College
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Mozart at Bard; Botstein in the Bardo
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Bard’s Fisher Center Lost Letter Mystery
As an amusing addendum to this year’s recently-concluded Bard Music Festival: last week, I shared a photo of myself, standing before a life-size poster of Bohuslav Martinů outside the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. It was only later that I revisited the image and noticed something a little peculiar. If you look down at the bottom of the photo, on the concrete at the base of the poster gallery is a perfectly visible letter “F.”
This was on the first weekend of the festival. I determined to look for it when I returned for the second weekend, and can you believe it, THE “F” WAS STILL THERE! I picked it up and held it in my hand for a moment, considering whether or not I should have it mounted on a chain so that I could wear it around my neck gangsta-style. But the angel on my shoulder prevailed, and I turned it in at the Fisher Center Box Office.
I wonder how long it lay there unmolested? The photo at the bottom right was posted by someone else in May. Clearly, at that time, the “F” was still mounted in its rightful place.
What the “F?”
Fisher Center at Bard
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Martinů and His World Bard Music Festival
Here’s a little teaser about the 35th Bard Music Festival, “Martinů and His World,” which will take place at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, August 8-10 and 14-17.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1247374413423449
As a bonus, I’m also including links (below) to a few works that will be featured on this year’s concerts, to give you an idea what to expect. Of course, a lot of other composers’ music will be performed, as well. This is Martinů AND HIS WORLD, remember. The programs come pretty fast and furious at Bard. It’s a lot to take in, but you know I’ll do my best to report here on what I can.
If the promo’s music bed intrigues you, it’s from “The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca.” The audio is excerpted from an earlier Bard concert, but the work itself is not scheduled for this year’s festival. All the same, I’ll include a link to that too.
But first, more about the Bard Music Festival:
Fisher Center at Bard
Nonet
Cello Sonata No. 3
“La revue de cuisine” (ballet about kitchen utensils!)
Symphony No. 6 “Fantaisies symphoniques”
“The Epic of Gilgamesh”
“Les fresques de Piero della Francesca”
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Bard’s “Dalibor” A Rare Smetana Treat
I am probably one of the few Americans who owns all of Smetana’s operas, though I confess I have not listened to more than three. Still, I believe I am correct in stating that “Dalibor” is the only one of them that doesn’t have a happy ending. In fact, if I understand correctly, the opera has two endings, both of them tragic. The current production at Bard College– the first fully-staged presentation in the United States – which I attended on Sunday afternoon, surprised me in providing a third. It punctuates the work with a strong and haunting image, to be sure, but I confess I’m still partial to the original, most commonly encountered, in which the hero is at least granted the dignity to take his fate into his own hands.*
But opera lovers can handle it. We are used to stories in which our heroes are crushed, either by character flaws, political machinations, jealousy, misunderstandings, or just plain cruel fate.
Bard’s “Dalibor” is an absorbing and at times even transporting experience. I still can’t get one of Smetana’s insinuating musical motifs out of my head. By and large, the production is well-conceived and executed. I always hope for more traditional productions of Romantic operas, setting them in actual medieval castles, the way composers and librettists originally envisioned, but I realize we’re living in an age when it is an unreasonable expectation. I guess after 150 years, the very idea is a little tired. At least the Bard production, directed by Jean-Romain Vesperini, isn’t Regietheater. The knights are not clowns driving around in VW buses. But it is dark and dour throughout. Still, Smetana’s music has enough ceremonial and dance music to remind us that this is also the composer of “The Bartered Bride.”
The director’s program note cites the inspiration of German Expressionism. To me, it looks more like steampunk-lite, with a kind of double-helix iron staircase dominating the stage on a rotating turntable. I must say, if one were going to conceive of a single set to serve for three lugubrious acts, the solution is quite ingenious. The staircase rotates, giving the director plenty of options for entrances and singers ascending and descending. (The set design is by Bruno de Lavenère.)
Further transformations are made possible through lighting effects by Christophe Chaupin. I’m not sure what material is draped from the line sets, but it’s made to look like curtains of chain mail that are raised and lowered and reflect the lights.
Despite the fixed set, it is not a visually stagnant production. I do wish it could have been opened up somehow. It IS a dark story, but the entire thing isn’t set in a dungeon. It is perhaps more a “fault” of the opera itself than it is any interpretative concepts. The entire thing is set in stone, in more ways than one.
The costumes by Alain Blanchot – at least most of them – are quasi-medieval, at least, and there are swords and spears rather than of lightsabers.
Basically, the plot concerns a knight, Dalibor, who is on trial for killing a burgrave in revenge for the execution of his friend, the musician Zdeněk. His righteous indignation and noble character stir the populace and there are simmering intimations of rebellion against the king. The burgrave’s sister, Milada, calls for Dalibor’s death. The king assents, until he learns more about the circumstances of Dalibor’s crime and, in his mercy, commutes his sentence to life in prison. Of course, Milada winds up falling for this noble soul and determines to free him.
Most interesting about the Bard production is the idea to have the specter of Zdeněk (a fabricated, silent role, played gracefully by Patrick Andrews), who is certainly central to the motivations and plot, literally wander the staircase, like Banquo’s ghost, feyly looming over the fates of the various characters. To give him even further emphasis, the decision was made to mirror his attire in the disguise of Milada, when she goes undercover, in drag, in her attempt to spring Dalibor from the bowels of the castle. The fact that Milada is made a kind of reincarnation of the knight’s fallen best friend, whom he mourns and even pines, lends an interesting homoerotic dimension that seems to exceed any concept of knightly brotherhood – never more so than when Zdeněk and Milada are blown up into massive projections (by Étienne Guiol) onto the chain mail curtain. Clearly, the production doesn’t want us to miss that these characters are being paralleled. Thankfully, the effect is more Bergmanesque than “Duck Soup.”
In the libretto, Dalibor emerges from a dream and mistakes Milada for a reincarnation of his friend – and soon they are engaged in a passionate love duet – so I suppose the germ is already there in the work’s conception. So the interpretive choice is not inappropriate, and it is not ineffective. If anything, it underscores the dominance not only of Dalibor’s affections for his friend, but also the motivating force of music itself as a thematic element. Only in the Czech lands would music be so tied up with patriotism and nationalist identity. (The fallen Zdeněk was a violinist and Dalibor comes into possession of his instrument, even planning to use it to signal the final surge of rebellion against injustice, if not tyranny.) It always makes me envious how strongly the Czech culture embraces its music.
“Dalibor” was a modest success at its premiere in 1868. It didn’t really take off until it was revived in 1886. Alas, it’s the old tale of an opera being underappreciated until after the composer’s death. (Smetana died two years earlier.) But do not go into it expecting another “Carmen.”
It is worth seeing, especially if you are a Czech music fanatic. If you’re well-versed in Smetana and Dvořák, I think you pretty much know what to expect. But the sound world is more in line with Dvořák’s darker symphonic poems and “Rusalka” than, say, the Serenade for Strings.
Hey, if you’re familiar with Smetana’s complete cycle of symphonic poems “Má vlast” (1874-79), you know it’s not just the picture postcards of “Vyšehrad,” “The Moldau,” and “From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields.” There’s plenty of tragedy and slaughter. That’s the Dark Ages for you, but also Romanticism. The Romantics love to dwell on the grim.
In “Dalibor,” there’s a passage that looks forward to “Má vlast”s “Tábor,” specifically the hammered motto associated with the Hussite Wars that segues into “Blanik,” which recalls the supernatural resurrection of St. Wenceslaus’ army in time of need. There’s also one motive that unavoidably conjures “the Ring.” Wagner is an obvious influence (I mean, come on – castles, knights, troubadours, and warrior maidens!), but the music is always unmistakably Bohemian.
The cast that Bard assembled for this production is an interesting one. All of the singers acquit themselves very well, even if their approaches aren’t always of a piece.
Alas, visa difficulties precluded the scheduled participation of Czech tenor Ladislav Elgr and Polish soprano Izabela Matula, but I confess my grasp of Czech is nonexistent, so for all I know the cast could have been singing flawless Klingon. I already knew what to expect from John Matthew Myers, a heroic tenor I was lucky enough to hear in Carnegie Hall last month, when conductor Leon Botstein revived Richard Strauss’ first opera, “Guntram.” Myers was exemplary, if the character this time isn’t giving quite so many opportunities to belt.
I wonder what his costar on that occasion, Angela Meade, would have made of Milada. Cadie J. Bryan is a small-voiced soprano, who nevertheless rose to the occasion in her duets with Myers and the more animated and extroverted Erica Petrocelli (as the rebel fireband Jitka, raised as Dalibor’s adopted daughter). Bryan was also affecting in her death scene. But early on, I was worried that her characterization was going to be one that was going to be bolstered more by her acting ability than the power of her voice. Physically, her waif-like appearance made her more believable than Meade would have been when the character disguises herself, Fidelio-like, as a boy.
Petrocelli has charisma to burn, and the bigger voice, commanding attention whenever she was on stage, but her characterization was also the stagiest. Bryan, less so, had the more naturalistic acting style.
Bass Wei Wu was for me the biggest surprise of the afternoon. As Dalibor’s jailer, Beneš, his voice was top to bottom resonant and awe-inspiring. It made me as happy as a lizard on a hot-rock.
That said, bass-baritone Alfred Walker, who sang Saint-Saens’ Henri VIII at Bard a few years ago, gave the most rounded performance. He was in great voice, as always. In contrast to many of those around him, who are given plenty of opportunities to storm the ramparts, as it were, his is a more reflective role. He’s regal when he needs to be, but he’s also given a great “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown” scene, in which he deliberates over the duties of the king and his private misgivings at having to condemn Dalibor. Walker’s acting was of a piece with the vocal requirements, which he fulfilled magnificently if undemonstratively, to make his King Vladislav a creation of flesh and blood.
Bard mastermind Leon Botstein was in the pit with the American Symphony Orchestra. Their rendering, for the most part, allowed the music to speak for itself. The Bard Festival Chorale, prepared by James Bagwell, always sings well. It’s an added joy that its members appear always to be having a good time. To have professional musicians tackle these rare works with such commitment is a blessing not to be underappreciated.
Today’s matinee, at 2 p.m., will be livestreamed in real time and then repeated on Sunday at 5 p.m. The remaining live performances will be given at Bard College’s Richard P. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts this weekend, on Friday at 4 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m.
The opera, of course, is but an appetizer to the main course of the Bard Music Festival, this year devoted to the Czech master Bohuslav Martinů. The festival, which will take place at Bard College over two weekends, August 8-10 and 14-17, will conclude with a semi-staged performance of Martinů’s opera, “Julietta,” also at the Fisher Center. I am elated to find Erica Petrocelli and Alfred Walker will be among the cast. John Matthew Myers will return to sing “The Epic of Gilgamesh” in a concert on August 16. You’ll find the full schedule at one of the links below.
Thank you, Bard and Leon Botstein for yet another opportunity to hear interesting, neglected music live, so that we may develop a fuller understanding of the artists, their cultures of origin, their places in, and influence upon, the wider classical repertoire, and allowing us a broader understanding of cultural history. Your services are invaluable.
*ERRATUM: Having done more research, I learned that there are indeed THREE endings for “Dalibor!”
Smetana’s “Dalibor” at Bard SummerScape
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/dalibor/
Bard Music Festival, “Martinů and His World”
Some of the past Bard operas are available for streaming here
Photos from the Fisher Center at Bard Facebook page
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