Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Bard Music Festival

Korngold & Birthday Celebrations on WWFM

May I obey all your commands with equal pleasure, sire!

Join me an hour earlier than usual today, as we’re on target to celebrate a lot of birthdays, including those of John Field, father of the nocturne; Franz Xaver Mozart, son of Wolfgang Amadeus; Serge Koussevitzky, famed conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; Donald Voorhees, founding music director of the Allentown Symphony Orchestra; pianist, composer, and conductor Ernest Schelling (one-time music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra); composer Tadeusz Baird; and pianists Alexis Weissenberg and Angela Hewitt.

There will also be a musical remembrance of cellist Anner Bylsma, who died yesterday at the age of 85.

At 6:00, it’s “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies. This week, it’s an all-Korngold hour, including music from two of the great Errol Flynn swashbucklers. Leon Botstein will remark on the composer and this year’s Bard Music Festival, of which Korngold is the focus. Botstein will conduct the U.S. premiere of Korngold’s opera, “Das Wunder der Heliane” – “The Miracle of Heliane” – tonight at Bard College, as preamble to the festival. Performances will run through August 4.

The festival proper will take place over two weekends, August 9 through 11, and August 16 through 18. For more information, visit fishercenter.bard.edu.

I’ll be splitting arrows with the precision of my bullseyes, this Friday from 3 to 7 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

July 26, 2019
Korngold Film Music at Bard Music Festival

Is Erich Wolfgang Korngold my favorite film composer? Quite possibly, yes. In fact, he’s one of my favorite composers, period. Chalk it up to a childhood misspent in the company of Errol Flynn and Bette Davis.

I’m especially excited, then, that Korngold will be the focus of this year’s Bard Music Festival. The festival, now in its 30th year, will be held over two weekends – from August 9 through August 11, and August 16 through August 18 – at Bard College, in upstate New York. Concert programs, talks, and panel discussions will examine every aspect of Korngold’s output, including an ample representation of his film music and that of some of his colleagues.

This week on “Picture Perfect,” my guest will be conductor Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and co-director of the Bard Music Festival. Dr. Botstein will join me in previewing some of the festival’s highlights and providing commentary on this most fascinating composer, who, as one of classical music’s greatest prodigies, had one foot in Old Vienna and the other in New World Hollywood.

As a kind of special preamble to the festival, Korngold’s opera, “Das Wunder der Heliane” – “The Miracle of Heliane” – will be presented in a fully staged production, in its U.S. premiere, starting tonight and running through August 4, again on the campus of Bard College. Korngold’s most famous opera, “Die tote Stadt,” will be performed semi-staged, as the festival’s finale, on August 18. For more information, visit fishercenter.bard.edu.

Then strike for the shores of Dover! It’s an hour of Korngold’s film music on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Friday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

July 26, 2019
Korngold’s Birthday & Bard Music Festival

Happy birthday, Erich Wolfgang Korngold!

I am so excited to have just gotten off the phone with Leon Botstein. Botstein, who is president of Bard College, is also co-artistic director of the Bard Music Festival, held each summer on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. This year, the festival’s focus will be on “Korngold and His World.”

Tune in this afternoon for some of Dr. Botstein’s insights into Korngold the composer, as we talk just a bit about the festival, which will take place this year over two weekends: August 9-11 and August 16-18.

Then watch this space for news of upcoming installments of “Picture Perfect” and “The Lost Chord,” which will include more of Botstein’s comments on Korngold’s significance as a composer for opera house, concert hall, and film.

The Bard Music Festival will encompass a veritable cornucopia of Korngold, including the composer’s two greatest operas – a concert performance of “Die tote Stadt,” which will round out the festival, on August 18, and a fully-staged production of “Das Wunder der Heliane,” which will act as a kind of preamble to the festival proper, from July 26 to August 4. Leon Botstein will conduct. As has been the case with so much music performed at Bard, “Heliane” is an opera that has never before received a staging in the United States.

The festival will shine light on all aspects of Korngold’s art, by way of his own work for different media (including a performance, with film, of selections from “The Adventures of Robin Hood”), and music by his contemporaries, those he influenced and those who were influenced by him.

You can find at more about “Das Wunder der Heliane” and the Bard Music Festival by visiting fishercenter.bard.edu.

Then tune in today, in the 4:00 hour EDT, to hear portions of my conversation with Dr. Botstein – with more to come on future episodes of “Picture Perfect” and “The Lost Chord” – on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College

May 29, 2019
Salieri: More Than Mozart’s Rival?

He was a generous teacher, who fostered Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, and even the son of the genius he was rumored to have poisoned.

His first act, when he was appointed Austrian Imperial Kapellmeister in 1788, was to revive Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” He was responsible for arranging first performances of his alleged nemesis’ Piano Concerto No. 22, the Clarinet Quintet, and the Symphony No. 40, and he had nothing but praise for “The Magic Flute.” He even took it upon himself to educate Franz Xaver Mozart, the composer’s son, who was born four months after his father’s alleged murder.

Already during the latter years of his life, Antonio Salieri’s enormous compositional output (37 operas, in addition to orchestral works, concertos, chamber music, and sacred pieces) gradually faded from public memory. Ironically, it is the scandalmongers who kept his name alive.

Rumors of Salieri’s involvement in Mozart’s death were codified by Alexander Pushkin in 1831 in the tragedy “Mozart and Salieri,” which appeared a few years after Salieri himself had passed. This was later set as an opera in 1898 by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

Was this any way to treat such a generous, hard-working composer? While he was certainly no Mozart – who was? – his music is finely crafted and often quite enjoyable, certainly no worse than that of a majority of his contemporaries.

But, as the saying goes, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. In a way, Peter Schaffer’s “Amadeus” was the best thing to happen to Salieri in nearly 200 years. How many people remember Mozart’s quartet partners (with Haydn), Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf and Jan Křtitel Vaňhal, both also talented and prolific composers?

By coincidence (?), Rimsky-Korsakov’s chamber opera is being performed today at Bard College, on the second half of a 1:30 p.m. program titled “Domestic Music Making in Russia,” as part of the 29th Annual Bard Music Festival: Rimsky-Korsakov and His World.

In another context, it would be a peculiar way to mark a composer’s birthday – but as I’m sure Dittersdorf and Vaňhal would agree, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Happy birthday, Antonio Salieri, Patron Saint of Mediocrity!

Russian film version of Rimsky’s “Mozart and Salieri” (without subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilw7oIkrDj4

In English, if a bit fuzzy:

Salieri’s Concerto for Flute, Oboe and Orchestra:

“I absolve you.”

August 18, 2018
Bard’s Rimsky-Korsakov Festival Explored

Fresh off the stalk of this year’s Bard Music Festival, it’s Nikolai Rimsky Korn-on-the-kob. Okay, it’s really Rimsky-Korsakov, but after a weekend in rural Upstate New York, how could I resist?

“Rimsky-Korsakov and His World” is the focus of this year’s festival, Bard’s 29th. In classic Bard fashion, artistic co-directors Leon Botstein – president of Bard College, music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, and founder of The Orchestra Now – and musicologist Christopher H. Gibbs have assembled two weekends’ worth of stimulating programs, slanted toward lesser-known repertoire by its subject, his contemporaries, his influences, and those he influenced, with a few of his imperishable classics (“Scheherazade,” the “Russian Easter Festival Overture”) tossed into the mix. Highlights are too many to list, but the festival will conclude its second weekend on Sunday with a concert performance of “The Tsar’s Bride,” one of Rimsky’s 15 operas. How often do we get to hear it?

Join me this afternoon, following today’s Noontime Concert, for some of the repertoire presented on this year’s 29th Annual Bard Music Festival: Rimsky-Korsakov and His World, including Rimsky’s Piano Concerto, Mikhail Glinka’s Sextet in E-flat major, Sergei Taneyev’s Symphony No. 4, and Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” in its original version, which I’ll be featuring in a new recording with Clipper Erickson, piano.

You’ll find more information about this one-of-a-kind festival, which skillfully walks the line between scholarship and entertainment, by visiting fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf/

The music may not be in a hurry, but it’s definitely Russian, this afternoon between 1 and 4 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Next summer’s focus: Erich Wolfgang KORNgold!

August 14, 2018

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