Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Bard Music Festival

Mozart’s Loss Is Our Guînes

The Mozart-related rediscoveries continue!

Last week, a 248-year-old notebook housed at France’s National Library was identified conclusively as having belonged to Mozart, when he was 22. The notebook, containing material set down between May and July 1778, was kept by the composer while he was employed as a music tutor in Paris for Marie-Louise-Philippine de Bonnières de Guînes. Her father, the Duke de Guînes, a highly-regarded flutist, commissioned Mozart’s Concerto for Flute and Harp, which you can’t help but encounter weekly if you ever listen to classical radio.

The notebook contains daily exercises for Mozart’s harp-playing protegée and seven original works for flute and harp, written under Mozart’s supervision. Mozart being Mozart, it appears he penned a substantial portion of the music himself. Presumably, these were designed to be played by Guînes and her father. The pieces were performed in public for the first time only yesterday at the library.

With the outbreak of the French Revolution, the Duke, a confidant of Marie-Antoinette, fled the country for England. Apparently, he stiffed Mozart for his work. In absentia, he authorized a butler to pay the composer half of what he was owed. Offended, Mozart refused to take it. Eat the rich!

As is so often the case, the rediscovery occurred when sorting through a pile of documents already stored at the library. A few years ago, somebody knocked over a stack at yet another library and discovered Stravinsky’s “Funeral Song,” a 12-minute orchestral piece composed in memory of his teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. It’s very important for librarians to catalogue their holdings well!

At any rate, the Mozart rediscovery is deemed to be a major one, a significant window into the mind, world, and creative and pedagogical processes of the 22 year-old master.

You’ll recall just the other week, a treasure trove of Salieri’s music was rediscovered. This seems then like an especially fortuitous summer for the Bard Music Festival to be focusing on “Mozart and His World” (to be held at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, August 7-16).

The thesis doesn’t mean it’s all Mozart. There will be works by his influences, his contemporaries and associates, and those he himself influenced and inspired; but as always at Bard, the real magic resides in the manner of the music’s presentation – the context, the juxtaposition of pieces, the pre-concert talks, and the scholarly panels. These are things you won’t find anywhere else.

The Bard Music Festival is part of the college’s larger celebration of the arts, Bard SummerScape (June 25-August 16), which encompasses opera, theater, dance, and cabaret at the campus’ Spiegeltent. If Mozart doesn’t really float your boat, there will be a fully-staged production of Richard Strauss’ opera “Die ägyptische Helena” (“The Egyptian Helen,” July 24-August 2). When’s the last time you heard that?

If I’m a little behind on sharing news of the discovery of the Mozart notebook, I take solace in the fact that the New York Times is only just getting around to reporting on it today as well! Read more about it at the link.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/arts/music/mozart-music-flute-harp.html?unlocked_article_code=1.sFA.YSkW.l46NoRKsVayu&smid=url-share

For tickets and information about Bard SummerScape, the Bard Music Festival, and “Mozart and His World,” visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/.

Concerto for Flute and Harp in C major, K. 299

Rediscovered pieces for flute and harp!

June 22, 2026
Mozart and His World (Including Salieri) at the Bard Music Festival

With the news that 149 lost works of Antonio Salieri have come to light, now seems like a good time to remind you about this year’s Bard Music Festival, “Mozart and His World” (to be held at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, August 7-16).

Is there Salieri on the program? Why, yes, yes there is. It falls under the category of “His World.” You see, even when the focus of the festival is on a well-known composer – and what composer is better-known than Mozart? – the planning committee goes into overdrive, racking their brains and spackling in around the edges with composers and works your average person-on-the-street may not have ever heard of, and certainly have never heard.

My preference, of course, is for the years Bard tackles figures such as Bohuslav Martinu or Carlos Chávez or Ralph Vaughan Williams or Erich Wolfgang Korngold; but under the Mozart umbrella, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Josef Mysliveček, Paul Wranitzky, Emanuel Schickaneder, Giovanni Paisiello, Muzio Clementi, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, Franz Xaver Mozart (Mozart’s composer son), and composer sons of the great Johann Sebastian Bach will have their moments to shine. Some of the works will be quite substantial, such as Michael Haydn’s Requiem in C minor.

And these are only the composers you might have heard of, through reading about Mozart in histories or program notes. How often, if ever, have you actually heard their music?

I don’t care about your level of expertise, or how jaded you may be, between the unusual repertoire, the imaginative juxtaposition of pieces, the pre-concert talks, and the Saturday morning panels with scholars and historians, you will ALWAYS learn something. Even if I personally may bristle at the idea of a Mozart festival – nothing wrong with it, it just doesn’t excite me – once you get me in the hall, I know it’s going to be fabulous.

The Bard Music Festival is part of the college’s larger celebration of the arts, Bard SummerScape (June 25-August 16), which encompasses opera, theater, dance, and cabaret at the campus’ Spiegeltent. If Mozart really doesn’t float your boat, there will be a fully-staged production of Richard Strauss’ opera “Die ägyptische Helena” (“The Egyptian Helen,” July 24-August 2). When’s the last time you heard that?

The Mozart festival will conclude with a semi-staged performance of “The Abduction from the Seraglio.”

Hang in there: 2027 will bring “Gershwin and His World.” That’s a subject that can shoot out tendrils in so many different, fascinating directions.

For tickets and information about Bard SummerScape, the Bard Music Festival, and “Mozart and His World,” visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/.

——–

A blurb about the rediscovered Salieri works (which include canons, duets, and trios, in the composer’s hand), with a link to the original German source:

https://slippedisc.com/2026/06/found-149-autograph-works-by-salieri/

A selection from Salieri’s “Prima la musica e poi le parole” (“First the music and then the words”), first performed on the same occasion that introduced Mozart’s “Schauspieldirektor” (“The Impresario”), and his collaboration with Mozart, the cantata “Per la ricuperate salute di Ofelia” (“For the recovered health of Ophelia”), rediscovered in 2015, will be included on a Bard Music Festival concert on August 9.

@fishercenterbard

June 3, 2026
Mozart at Bard; Botstein in the Bardo

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!

——-

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/

April 13, 2026
Bard Music Festival Martinů Deep Dive

One more post to mop up a few things I’d been meaning to address about the Bard Music Festival, and then I promise to try to find other things to talk about until next year’s schedule is announced in February.

One of the great challenges at Bard, when the only time one really seems to have to sit and focus is while actually attending concerts, is that there is very little opportunity to write while the festival itself is actually in progress. The rest of the time is taken up by travel and eating and sleeping and socializing. I lament all the observations and clever turns of phrases and natural flow between ideas that have been lost for the simple matter of not being able to drive and type at the same time. And no, despite any evidence to the contrary, I am not a great dictator. By that I mean, I am not the greatest extemporizer. For me, writing is more like sculpting. I am forever building up and chiseling away at the raw material. To converse with the actual Classic Ross Amico is a very different experience from reading him. You might say I am a life student of the Jimmy Stewart School of Articulation.

Then, of course, I also have other things I have to write about. I like to promote my radio shows, for instance, so that knocks out a couple of days a week. Occasionally I’ll even have an article due. I don’t know how I did it, back in the days when I had a weekly column, on top of sometimes multiple radio jobs.

At any rate – and thanks for hanging in there, as I am finally about to get around to the meat of the matter – there are just a few more details about my experiences at this year’s festival, “Martinů and His World,” I would like to share. These include a few photos of festival merch, which as I commented elsewhere, for whatever reason, was much diminished from previous years, when Rhinebeck’s Oblong Books offered tables of recordings for attendees to peruse and purchase. And despite the proliferation of streaming options, yes, people did buy. Classical music people are a breed apart; many of us still love physical media. By the end of the second weekend, the tables were always fairly well picked over.

This year, no Oblong, but there was still the tie-in volume of essays, “Martinů and His World,” edited by festival scholars-in-residence Michael Beckerman and Aleš Březina. Some of the unusual attractions include a section devoted Martinů’s operas, a recently discovered Martinů diary, and recollections from some who knew the composer during his years in the United States. The book is still available for order from University of Chicago Press and other fine booksellers (likely online).

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo258537662.html

Of course, there was also the festival t-shirt, which I’ve already mentioned, this year sporting one of the composer’s amusing self-caricatures, with his hedgehog-headed alter ego seated at the piano. A lavishly-illustrated 70-page festival program (free with ticket) is chock full of information and always a valued keepsake.

https://fishercenter.bard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/8-7-25_SinglePages_Martinu.pdf

Attempting to fill the vacuum left by Oblong, in its more modest way, was the Bohuslav Martinů Foundation and Institute. There was a table of paraphernalia laid out to entice one to join the Martinů Society, along with some attractive books and, all too briefly, some of their in-house-produced CDs. I purchased one that includes “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” dating from 1959, the year of the work’s first performance. The recording features Marilyn Horne and Walter Berry (in great voice) and is conducted by Martinů champion Paul Sacher. Later, I googled this to learn that it is not available anywhere else. Nor were many of the other recordings, so now I regret not buying more. I would have loved to have heard some of the other historic material, a lot of which hasn’t even been uploaded to YouTube, and some of which is now, sadly, sold out even on the Martinu Foundation website.

https://www.martinu.cz/en/institutions/bohuslav-martinu-institute-in-prague/

Oh well. More items to add to my Holy Grail list.

I am saving the best for last, as I often meet interesting people at the festival, but none more compatible than Mather Pfeiffenberger, next to whom fate seated me while I was shoveling down a wan Bard wrap outside one of the venues in my desperation for some sustenance between events. Mather is extraordinarily knowledgeable. It’s rare that I meet anyone with whom I can communicate so freely, on every level, about music. We share a language of refined geekdom that, in my experience, is quite beyond the capacity of your average classical music weirdo.

In two years, Bard will be tackling “Gershwin and His World,” so somehow he and I got to talking about American music. It turns out that Mather has done quite a bit of radio work himself, at WHRB, Harvard. I’ve looked at some of his playlists, and I assure you he is first-rate. In fact, there was plenty of stuff I wasn’t familiar with, especially some of the historic recordings I didn’t even know existed, that I wouldn’t mind checking out myself. Furthermore, the guy’s interviewed Aaron Copland and harassed Walter Piston for autographs (twice).

In the words of Rick Blaine, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. A lively correspondence began almost immediately and has been full of enlightening information and links to, again, audio files I didn’t even know existed. I don’t think I flatter myself in saying I have held my own in reciprocation. I’ve been very busy in the week since my return from Bard – in fact the reason I wasn’t able to finish writing this and get it posted this morning was because I had to be on the road yet again – but I look forward to learning and listening to more.

Next year at Bard: “Mozart and His World” – and as I say, in 2027, Gershwin!

Bard Music Festival

BONUS: I’d been sitting on this video for many months, hoping to share, but then forgot all about it. It’s a performance of Martinů’s vigorous and optimistic “Bergerettes,” presented, incongruously, film noir style. Enjoy!

Fisher Center at Bard

August 24, 2025
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

August 21, 2025

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