Another exhaustive – and exhausting – Bard Music Festival has come to end. In fact, so depleting can be this two-weekend gauntlet of marathon concerts, panels, and conversations – on top of the vagaries of travel, traffic, and simple bodily upkeep – that it can sometimes take me a good day or two to sufficiently recover. The trade-off can be a certain loss of fire in my reportage, but I hope not. I’ll do what I can here to stir the coals and recollect “Martinů and His World” in tranquility.
I’m not sure where I found the energy (lack of time is a powerful incentive), but somehow, I managed to fire off my reactions to Friday and Saturday at white heat early on Sunday morning. These I posted in raw form until I could touch them up and smooth them out a little bit the next day. This allows me to narrow my focus to Sunday, the final day of the festival. I’ll start off by saying I didn’t sleep well on Saturday night, or didn’t sleep enough. I have this thing sometimes, where I just snap awake at 4:00. All the more remarkable, then, that I was able to make it through the day – and then drive home – with as much energy and focus as I did. But it wasn’t always easy.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Bard is not for the faint of heart. Certainly, anyone can attend a concert there and get real enjoyment from it and even walk away feeling as if they’ve experienced something special. But if you’re in for the full run of every concert, lecture, and panel, you’d better bring your Bard big-boy pants. Also, plan your meals and caffeine intake and do everything you can to get some good nights’ sleep.
Sunday morning’s chamber music concert wound up being a bit more demanding than the standard Bard matinee. You have to understand, these concerts are planned by academics, often supporting specific theses, and once they’ve secured the resources and assembled the performers and have you in the hall, they’re going to pile it on as much as they can. So don’t go into it expecting a pedestrian concert experience. You’re not there for mindless pleasure. You won’t be offered a tray of koláče. Sure, a musical pastry might serve to break things up a bit. Certainly, it would be enjoyable to listen to. It might even cleanse the palate, so that you can reset and be in the right frame of mind to take in yet another unknown work by a mostly-forgotten composer writing in perhaps a similar, uningratiating style to the one that came before. But comfort was not the aim of Sunday morning’s concert.
In recent years, Bard’s Sunday mornings have been full of delightful chansons and romances (“Berlioz and His World”) and English chamber music and British art song (“Vaughan Williams and His World”). With Bohuslav Martinů, there could very easily have been some Dvořák or some Copland that would have set easily on Sunday brunch.
But the theme was “Martinů’s Legacy,” an impressive menu, admittedly, constructed with great care and scrupulous attention to detail; but I’m afraid with the dishes, served as they were, one piled on top of another, and then another, there was the danger of the inherent piquancy of any individual work being blunted by the next.
The program opened with “Ten Bagatelles,” juvenilia compiled by Alexander Tcherepnin from his teen years, pieces which, if the truth be told, were not all that interesting. (He got better as an adult.)
Then Iva Bittová sang Martinů’s “Four Songs on Czech Folk Poetry,” with child-like simplicity, in a voice you would not expect from a middle-aged woman (still uncannily youthful at 67). But Bittová was new to me. I didn’t realize that in her native Czechia she is a celebrated avant-gardist. It wasn’t until she took up her violin for one of her own settings that I was confronted with the full scope of her pixilating force, slipping off her shoes to pace the stage in a toe-ring and employing a variety of extended techniques, with unconventional blocking, foot-stomping, and primeval vocalizations. I found her a paradoxical blend of disarming and disturbing. She’s like a Czech Meredith Monk, though clearly her own, feral animal. I should have suspected what I was in for when she presented her accompanist in the Martinů with a sprig of purple loosestrife, as opposed to, say, roses, another child-like gesture.
After Bittová, it was hard to downshift to Chou Wen-chung’s Suite for Harp and Woodwind Quintet, exquisitely imagined, delicately scored, with a kind of Chinese impressionism leavened with suggestions of folk music. You can tell when musicians (in this case, harpist Susan Drake and friends) feel they did a really good job, when at the end of a performance they’re all already smiling.
Witold Lutoslawski’s “Dance Panels,” another folk-inflected piece, for clarinet and piano, is one of the few works on the program that turns up on recitals and radio from time to time. Alone, it makes an impression. Here, it was just another act in the vaudeville. (Still, well-played.)
Frank Zappa’s “Ruth is Sleeping” was impressive for its embrace of some pretty serious atonality. Originally composed for synclavier, it was performed on Sunday in a transcription for piano four-hands. (The title refers to Ruth Underwood, a percussionist in Zappa’s band, The Mothers of Invention, who slept under her instrument.) At times, the work begins to suggest jazz improvisation. In any case, I’d be surprised if Ruth could sleep through it. Revisiting it on a recording, I like it a lot better now than I did on Sunday morning.
That said, I found the 1933 “Etude” that followed it, by Jaroslav Ježek, more rock-and-roll, along the lines of Prokofiev in firebrand mode, though without the evident melodic gift.
Joan Tower’s “Petroushskates,” for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, sprang from her enjoyment of figure skating and her admiration for Igor Stravinsky (especially the ballet “Petroushka”). The piece, which is most amusing at its start and finish (with an allusion to “The Rite of Spring”) was played with the composer in attendance. Tower has long served on the Bard faculty. If she had actually taken the stage, I might have gotten a worthwhile photo of her to share. But she didn’t, and that’s fine too.
The program was brought to a close with Martinů’s Quartet for Oboe, Violin, Cello, and Piano. Interestingly, the first performance featured oboist Mitchell “Mitch” Miller, later of “Sing Along with Mitch” fame, and violinist William Kroll, who wrote the famous encore piece “Banjo and Fiddle.” At 12 minutes, it was not the briefest work on the program, but laboring against the cumulative effect of the others, it still went by agreeably and quickly.
Lots of interesting material here, but again it risked being too much of a good thing. It played to intellectual curiosity more than visceral pleasure. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as one comes into it with an open mind and an empty bladder. (Yet again, the concert, performed without intermission, ran long, and my morning cups of coffee were looking for the exit.)
After a break for lunch (and more coffee), I headed over to the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts’ Sosnoff Theater for the next challenge, probably the most highly-praised of Martinů’s 14 operas, “Julietta.”
This one really snuck up on me. Walking in already battered after the morning concert and on about four-hours’ sleep, I felt harried and unamused for a good portion of the first act, with my eyes having to bounce back and forth between the rapid exchange of multi-lingual dialogue, sung and spoken by too many characters, to the English supertitles high above the stage. But by the end of the act, finally, there was some human connection, and things got much better from there.
The opera is based on Georges Neveux’s 1927 play “Juliette ou la Clé des songes” (“Juliette, or the Key to Dreams”). Martinů himself crafted the libretto, first in French and then later Czech. It was given its first performance in Prague in 1938. I don’t know about the play, but the opera could be described as an absurdist psychological dramedy about the hunger for human connection. There aren’t any real stand-apart arias or set-pieces – like surrealism itself, it’s hard to pin down – yet there is kind of elusive continuity. The nature of the character of Julietta is a very interesting one. I would have never suspected from the beginning of the opera, which as I say, I found a tad annoying, that it would turn out to be such a richly satisfying creation. I got the requisite shudder at the end which is always my gauge for an exceptional musical experience.
Martinů has an immediately recognizable “sound,” but when he steps away from traditional forms like those of the symphony, the concerto, the string quartet, the sonata, he really is quite expert at creating unique dramatic worlds. While a bit of a slippery shapeshifter himself, Martinů is about the last guy I would peg as a surrealist. There are photos of him wearing his street clothes as he lies on the beach. (On second thought…)
The opera also happens to have a lot of humor in it, some of it of a slightly queasy nature (again, surrealism), but there were also some genuine, uncomplicated laughs, such as when bass Kevin Thompson as the convict offers to show Michel his tattoos.
A procession of walk-on and recurring side-characters, wearing fezzes, pith helmets, and sailors’ caps, put me in mind of a Wes Anderson movie. But the enduring impression is more Kafkaesque. Where else but in Kafka would you find yourself at the Bureau Central des Rêves? A dream bureau would seem the very height of insurmountable bureaucracy. The writings of Philip K. Dick also sprang to mind, though of course these came much later, because of Dick’s tendency to blur the lines between reality and perception, or more accurately, reality and alternate, simulated, or counterfeit reality.
Interestingly, as a big Korngold fan, I also noted some parallels with the opera “Die tote Stadt” (semi-staged at Bard as the finale of “Korngold and His World” in 2019). A substantial portion of both stories takes place in dreams, there is an obsessive lover whose frustrated passion drives him to extreme measures, and the side characters are all commedia dell’arte or stock comic types. However, the ultimate decisions of the operas’ protagonists couldn’t be more unalike.
Anyway, dreams are the currency of surrealism. As one of the characters remarks, “You think dreams are just a fantasy?”
The singers were all exemplary, right down to the smaller roles – with the exception of one, who was basically a walk-on. (I think he must have been recruited from the choir and lacked the power of his colleagues.) Erica Petrocelli was excellent as Julietta. You can understand why anyone would idealize her. However, despite hers being the title role, she’s not really the lead. In this regard, the laurels must go to Aaron Blake as Michel, Julietta’s would-be lover, who chooses the possibility of attaining the illusion of love over reality. Blake, who is on-stage for just about the entire opera, is a tenor of superlative gifts. He rises to unforeseen challenges in the work’s final act, wowing with some extraordinary vocal stamina. If you want to know more about the rest of the singers, check the program at the link below. None of them were any less than rock solid.
The “semi-staging” – which may as well be considered staged (how much more action is required?), except for the fact that the orchestra shared the boards, and yeah, I suppose, the singers were never far from their scores – employed projections by John Horzen. The virtual backdrops were like Post-Impressionist child’s renderings of a French seaport town, some trees around a well in the forest, and the exterior of the Bureau Central des Rêves (Central Bureau of Dreams), with Little Nemoesque animated interludes involving a paddlewheel boat breaching clouds and skirting the moon. The production’s stage director was Marco Nistico.
Leon Botstein conducted the American Symphony Orchestra, of which he has been the music director since 1992.
One of the things I really like about Botstein – and there are many – is how sincerely he appreciates his colleagues’ artistry. He is always generous with his acknowledgments of young artists, as he was last week, with musicians and soloists performing with The Orchestra Now, and this week, taking the time to shake hands and speak with each of the artists during curtain calls. His public image is that of somewhat of a loveable curmudgeon – as if Eeyore were trapped inside the body, and made the sartorial choices, of a Bond villain. But there’s a lot of love in that man, and clearly he’s living his best life.
Lest I leave you with the wrong impression, I loved this year’s festival. Bard did what Bard does best and really swung for the fences, with the focus on an undeservedly neglected composer and a colorful supporting cast of largely unfamiliar players – by which I mean not the musicians, but the composers themselves.
The only indisputable repertory piece presented over the course of two weekends of concerts was Maurice Ravel’s Violin Sonata. You might recognize some of the others (Witold Lutoslawski’s “Dance Panels,” Joan Tower’s “Petroushskates”), but none of them are exactly overdone.
According to Bard co-artistic director Christopher H. Gibbs, the festival presented 33 works by Bohuslav Martinů in 7 days, which was more Martinů heard over a comparable period of time at any point in history anywhere in the world.
At least two of the works emerged as masterful, far exceeding expectations if only known previously from recordings: on Weekend One, the “Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano, and Timpani,” and on Weekend Two, “The Epic of Gilgamesh.” I mean, with a shelf and a half of Martinů at home, I was already familiar with some of the others (the Flute Sonata, the Cello Sonata No. 3, the Nonet), which are already among my favorites. That’s not to say I do not look forward to deepening my acquaintance with many others heard (by me) for the first time during the festival. The symphonies deserve to take their places alongside those of those of other well-known composers that for some reason seem to exist just along the periphery of the mainstream. They’re every bit as interesting and well-crafted as those of Carl Nielsen, for instance.
Next year at Bard, it’s “Mozart and His World,” with Gershwin on the way in 2027. I’m hoping the latter will provide a good excuse to explore some neglected American byways, on top of all the other intriguing directions the programming could possibly go.
When announcing Mozart, Botstein made a quip to the effect that we shouldn’t worry about the focus being on such a popular composer; they’ll still be sure to come up with plenty of things to disappoint everyone. Two guarantees at Bard: you’re going to get some very unusual stuff, and you’re going to get a lot of it. Let the pleasure-pain continue!
Thank you, Bard, from the bottom of my wizened little heart, for “Bohsulav Martinů and His World,” yet another festival subject I never thought I would live to see.
Here’s a pdf of this year’s 70-page program booklet. In keeping with the concerts themselves, it is no trifling undertaking, full of interesting biographical, historical, and musical information, and lavishly illustrated with photos and period artwork. Especially amusing are Martinů’s doodles and self-portraits. You won’t want to miss the panels in which he wrestles with a bear-like piano (pp. 34-37)!
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/8-7-25_SinglePages_Martinu.pdf
Fisher Center at Bard
