Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Bard Music Festival

Staying Home with Nadia Boulanger at Bard

I confess, when it comes to my health, I’m a bit of a milquetoast.

At this point, even though I’m vaccinated, I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in an enclosed auditorium with folks who can’t be counted on to wear their masks over their noses, or at all for that matter.

While I very much enjoyed the livestream of Ernest Chausson’s opera “Le Roi Arthus” from Bard College last week, it was clear I had made the right decision – for me, anyway – to stay at home, as there were at least five people within the line of sight who were not masked, despite a mandatory masking policy. Sure, everyone had to provide proof of vaccination and temperatures were taken at the door. But I just don’t want to deal with getting sick, to whatever degree, if I can possibly avoid it, and I certainly don’t want to be responsible for conveying illness to my family or friends, many of whom are considerably older than myself.

It’s not just the Sosnoff Theater (where the opera was performed, and in which many of the orchestral concerts take place), which is cavernous, and I’m sure well-ventilated; it’s also the LUMA Theater (where the chamber concerts and panels are presented), a much more intimate venue, and the crowded lobbies, concession stands, and above all, restrooms, which are like cattle chutes even under the best of circumstances.

So for as much as I love the Bard Music Festival, I’ll be keeping my distance this year, in the hope that next year will be better.

THE GOOD NEWS is that because of the extraordinary circumstances – a festival held in time of pandemic – many of the programs will be livestreamed at a reduced price. Admittedly, streaming is rather thin brew next to the experience of attending live music, but it does allow the muted pleasure of experiencing lots of unusual and neglected repertoire in the context of intelligently curated programs.

And this year promises to be an especially good one, since the focus will be “Nadia Boulanger and Her World.” Boulanger, of course, was one of the great musical pedagogues of the 20th century. Her influence was incalculable. She was particularly important to the artistic development of innumerable American composers, from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass. So the festival’s repertoire will be notably diverse and, as always, intriguing.

Also of significance, Boulanger is the first woman to be selected as a focal point of the summer event (though Grazyna Bacewicz was the subject of a satellite festival in San Francisco, Bard Music West, in 2019, and works by women composers – including Nadia’s sister, Lili – have been represented as a matter of course through Bard’s characteristically diverse programming).

This year’s Bard Music Festival will take place over two weekends, August 6-8 and August 12-15. It’s a great opportunity to experience a lot of music you would otherwise probably never get to hear in concert. If you’re interested in out-of-the-ordinary programming, definitely take a few minutes to see what it’s all about. For more information, visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf/

Mme Boulanger once expressed disdain for students who missed her classes, because they didn’t want to get caught up in rioting in the streets of Paris in 1934. She felt they weren’t taking music seriously enough. In opting for the safety of these at-home livestreams, I can practically feel the withering glare through her pince-nez.

August 6, 2021
Bard Music Festival: Rediscoveries Online

I know I have a tendency to talk a lot about Bard College. But it deserves to be talked about! Always a lot of interesting things happening there, on its bucolic campus within sight of the Catskills.

Yesterday, in conjunction with Nadia Boulanger’s birthday, I mentioned its summer music festival, which is a mecca, or should be, for anyone interested in live performance of rarely-heard, largely forgotten, and totally worthwhile music, presented over an immersive fortnight of concerts, lectures, and panels. Ordinarily, there’s a lot else going on, on Bard campus, all summer long.

“Nadia Boulanger and Her World” was to have been the focus of this year’s festival. Because of COVID, that has been postponed until next summer. But as you know, Nature abhors a vacuum (even as she may adore a pandemic), so in the meantime Bard has stepped up with some very enticing virtual programs, which it is presenting under the title “Out of the Silence: Bard Music Festival Rediscoveries.”

This series of live-streamed concerts includes works by classic, though underexposed, Black composers, alongside musical staples for string orchestra by Dvořák, Mendelssohn, Bartók, and Tchaikovsky. These are performed by the college’s resident ensemble, The Orchestra Now (TŌN), under the direction of Leon Botstein and his associates. Botstein is music director of the American Symphony Orchestra and president of Bard College.

The programs are presented on Saturdays at 5:30 pm EDT, with preconcert panels offered an hour before. Since it is not always the best hour for me to be listening, I am delighted to find that past concerts in the series are being archived online.

Here’s Program Two, with an introductory composers’ round table, featuring Adolphus Hailstork, Jessie Montgomery, Alvin Singleton, and Joan Tower. The music-making – which includes Montgomery’s “Strum,” Singleton’s “After Choice,” Hailstork’s “Sonata da Chiesa” (highly recommended), and Dvořák’s “Serenade for Strings” – begins around the 58-minute mark.

As you can see, they’ve figured out a way to present these concerts safely, outdoors, with strings appropriately distanced, and no potential for airborne contagion by way of plumes from wind or brass instruments.

Again, the next program in the series will be presented this Saturday. Here’s a link for free reservations for the remaining concerts:

https://tickets.fishercenter.bard.edu/2392/2396

Since the coronavirus shutdown, Bard has been extraordinarily generous with its archival material, sharing video of orchestral and opera performances from past festivals. In many of these, Botstein conducts the ASO. You’ll find much to choose from here:

https://fishercenter.bard.edu/upstreaming/

Times are tough for artists, as they are for everybody else. If you enjoy these offerings, or any of the virtual streams posted by other musicians and organizations, please consider supporting them with your contribution. Even a little bit means something, if everybody chips in.

Masked and distanced: The Bard musicians in rehearsal

Fisher Center at Bard

September 17, 2020
Nadia Boulanger: Influential Music Teacher
Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) has been described as the most influential teacher since Socrates.

Her students included everyone from Dinu Lipatti to Igor Markevitch, from Aaron Copland to Elliott Carter, from Astor Piazzolla to Philip Glass, from Michel Legrand to Quincy Jones, from Leonard Bernstein to “What Makes It Great?” radio host Rob Kapilow.

Her influence on American music, in particular, has been incalculable. Hopefuls flocked to her American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, where she accepted applicants from all backgrounds, provided they were determined to learn. It was Virgil Thomson who quipped, “She was a one-woman graduate school, so powerful and permeating that legend credits every United States town with two things: a five and dime and a Boulanger pupil.” The five and dimes may have faded, but not so the legacy of the “Boulangerie.”

This summer, Boulanger was to have been the focus of “Nadia Boulanger and Her World,” a two-week celebration of her music and influence, at the Bard Music Festival, held on the campus of Bard College in upstate New York, since sensibly postponed to next year, because of COVID concerns. The concerts, talks, and panels will examine not only Boulanger’s own contributions, but also those of her sister, the tragically short-lived composer Lili Boulanger, and representative works by her innumerable students and contemporaries.*

In the meantime, I stumbled across this fascinating documentary a few months back. It’s full of great stuff – first-hand accounts, historical footage, and terrific insights. Bernstein is interviewed in French, beginning around the 7-minute mark:

Beneath those grey hairs and pince-nez lurked an iron will that brooked no nonsense, yet Boulanger was surprisingly accepting, astonishingly objective, and generally dead-on in her assessments. When asked if a hierarchy could be established among composers – Beethoven being more important than Max Bruch, for instance – she suggests the pointlessness of such comparisons, stating it is like comparing the Himalayas to Montmartre.

She accepts the philosophical breadth of her pupils as a matter of course: “It’s very different to confront a work you don’t know yet, or a work in which you have to recognize some worth, while secretly saying to yourself, ‘that’s a trend I would never follow.’ That’s a matter of personal taste. Cannot culture allow us to go beyond personal taste and see the beauty of an object? I may not want to buy it, but I can see that it’s beautiful.”

Clearly, she was an extraordinary person. Happy birthday, Nadia Boulanger!
- There’s always something interesting going on at Bard. Check out the Bard Music Festival “Rediscoveries” series, featuring underplayed works by classic Black composers on the same programs with beloved masterpieces for string orchestra by Tchaikovsky and Bartók, now streaming on Saturdays:
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf/

Fisher Center at Bard
September 16, 2020
Bard Music Festival Discovering Neglected Gems

Eureka!

I feel like a classical music prospector who’s struck the motherlode of unusual and neglected repertoire!

The Bard Music Festival, held each summer at Bard College in sylvan upstate New York, is the crown jewel of Bard SummerScape, a broader celebration of the arts. The festival’s primary focus is on a specific composer and his or her world. So even if the star attraction is, say, Rimsky-Korsakov, Sibelius, or Carlos Chávez, a significant amount of the programming is devoted to that composer’s contemporaries, influences, and successors.

No word yet on whether or not the Bard Music Festival will decide to move ahead with this summer’s projected celebration of Nadia Boulanger. But judging from the facts that just about every other music festival in North America has already cancelled, and that Bard College is located just two hours north of New York City, I’m not holding my breath (except around other people, especially at the grocery store).

In the meantime, Bard is finding ways to connect with audiences beyond its idyllic campus, and I am pumped to have tapped into this treasure trove of past Bard performances, especially of the operas (read on).

Traditionally, musicians of the American Symphony Orchestra have formed the core of the Bard Festival Orchestra (Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, serves as artistic director of both), though in recent years, a number of the concerts have also been performed by Bard’s resident orchestra, The Orchestra NOW.

Some of ASO’s contributions, Bard-related and otherwise, can now be streamed from the orchestra’s website:

ASO Online

In addition, every week, the Fisher Center at Bard is sharing a page of content based on the outstanding work the festival has done in reviving the neglected output of a number of deserving composers. This week, the focus is on Sergei Taneyev:

https://fishercenter.bard.edu/upstreaming/

Nadia Boulanger is the first woman to be selected as the focal point of Bard proper (though Grazyna Bacewicz was the subject of a satellite festival in San Francisco, Bard Music West, last year, and works by women composers – including Nadia’s sister, Lili – have been included as a matter of course in regular Bard programming). Boulanger’s influence, as one of the great pedagogues of the 20th century, was enormous. She was particularly influential in the artistic development of innumerable American composers. So when the festival does come to pass, the repertoire should be notably diverse and, as always, fascinating.

For more information, visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf/

May 14, 2020
Korngold’s Symphony on The Classical Network

The Tuesday noon concert is on hiatus for the remainder of the summer. So I’ll have a blank slate this afternoon, on The Classical Network.

With another stormpocalypse bearing down on the Trenton-Princeton area (maybe), I’ll present, among my featured highlights, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp, the composer’s emotional and artistic reaction to war-torn Vienna.

As a Jew, Korngold lived as an exile in Hollywood following the Anschluss, earning fame and fortune through his film scores for Errol Flynn. In fact, he once quipped that Robin Hood had saved his life. Korngold may have survived the war, but by 1945 the world he had known was gone forever. When he attempted to reestablish his career back home, he found himself regarded as an uncomfortable reminder of shame, guilt, and destruction, and the late Romantic syntax of his music had come to seem like the product of a bygone era. To lend perspective, John Cage unveiled his 4’33” in 1952, the same year that Korngold completed his symphony.

The Symphony in F-sharp is not by any means “film music,” though it does allude to some of the scores he wrote for Warner Brothers – “Juarez,” “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex,” “Captain Blood,” and “Kings Row.” The work includes an obligatory Korngoldian happy ending, but the overall mood is one of loss and ruination. It was performed only thrice during the composer’s lifetime. The first performance was so under-rehearsed that the composer tried (unsuccessfully) to put a halt to it.

Over a decade after Korngold’s death, the score was rediscovered by conductor Rudolf Kempe in the library of the Munich Philharmonic. Kempe set down the world-premiere recording for RCA in 1972. Alongside RCA’s Classic Film Scores Series and a new recording of “Die Tote Stadt,” it set the ball rolling, slowly but inexorably, toward a reassessment of Korngold’s music, which gradually picked up pace in the 1990s, as musicians and record companies began to look further afield with the realization that everyone had already replaced their LPs of the standard repertoire on compact disc.

The conductor Dmitri Mitropoulos once wrote of Korngold’s symphony, “All my life I have searched for the perfect modern work. In this symphony I have found it.” Unfortunately, Mitropoulos died before he could realize his plan to perform it.

Korngold was a good man – he shared the wealth of his success in Hollywood to help family and displaced friends in need – but he was not a religious man. Nor was he very much tied up in his heritage. He commented that he and his family had always thought of themselves as Viennese; it was Hitler who made them Jewish. Korngold dedicated his symphony to the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the country that had become his second home. Korngold died in Los Angeles in 1957.

Tune in this afternoon to hear Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp, among my featured works, between 12 and 4 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

NOTE: The symphony will be performed on Saturday night at the Fisher Center at Bard, as part of the second weekend of this year’s Bard Music Festival, held at Bard College, “Korngold and His World.” More information is available at fishercenter.bard.edu.

August 13, 2019

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