In less than a month, the sleeping giant of Czech music will awake!
The 35th annual Bard Music Festival, “Martinů and His World,” will to be held largely on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, August 8-17.
Why is Bohuslav Martinů not better known? Perhaps it’s because he wrote so damn much in so many difference styles. With a career that took him from Czechoslovakia to Paris to the United States and then back again to Europe, absorbing a multiplicity of stylistic influences along the way, Martinů is not the easiest guy to pin down.
Some of his works have a strong Czech national flavor, revealing a spiritual descent from the line of Dvořák and Smetana. Others are evidently modernist, full of churning flywheels and motor rhythms, characteristic of a mechanized age. Others still flirt with popular styles, especially jazz. He’s a unique mash-up of Bohemian, French, and American influences. His “modernism,” such as it is, is seldom at the expense of broadening passages of great lyrical beauty.
Over two weekends, the Bard Music Festival will do what it does best: immerse audiences in works from all periods of the composer’s creative life, setting them off against music of his role models, his contemporaries, and those in turn he inspired. The listening experience will be enhanced by panel discussions, pre-concert talks, and lobby chit-chat with fellow enthusiasts over coffee and sandwiches.
Conductor and Bard president Leon Botstein will oversee orchestral, orchestral/choral, and opera performances, at the helm of the American Symphony Orchestra and Bard’s crackerjack graduate ensemble, The Orchestra Now. Evening concerts will take place at the Sosnoff Theater, the state-of-art concert hall housed in the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.
Daylight concerts and panels will be held across campus in the more intimate surroundings of the 300-seat Olin Hall. Performers will include superb musicians and ensembles from the faculty of the Bard Conservatory, guests, and visiting artists with long relationships with the festival.
For the uninitiated, the prospect of getting one’s head around Martinů’s output can seem a little daunting. Yet the composer’s music is immediately appealing, generally easily digestible, and often a great deal of fun.
Treat yourself to this preview featuring Bard co-artistic directors Leon Botstein and Christopher H. Gibbs. The music bed is from Martinů’s “Three Frescoes of Piero della Francesca” – not part of the festival, but performed on a previous concert by Botstein and The Orchestra Now.
I’m especially looking forward to hearing Martinů’s Nonet, the Cello Sonata No. 3, the Flute Sonata, the jazz sextet “La revue de cuisine,” and a selection of his Etudes and Polkas for piano. Among the larger works will be the Symphonies Nos. 2 & 6, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” the Violin Concerto No. 2, and a semi-staged performance of his opera “Julietta.”
This being Bard, there will be plenty of fascinating rarities by other hands, including a string quartet by Martinů student (and mistress) Vítězslava Kaprálová and a piano concertino I didn’t even know existed by his friend and champion Rudolf Firkušný.
Also featured will be works by Iva Bittová, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Antonín Dvořák, Petr Eben, Karel Husa, Leoš Janáček, Jaroslav Ježek, Arthur Honegger, Kryštof Mařatka, Jan Novák, Maurice Ravel, Jaroslav Řídký, Erwin Schulhoff, Josef Suk, Alexandre Tansman, Joan Tower, and Frank Zappa!
For more information about “Martinů and His World,” including a more complete schedule, visit
The festival is the crown jewel in the diadem of Bard SummerScape, Bard’s annual celebration of the arts, now in progress. Fans of Czech music will also eagerly anticipate a fully-stage production of Bedřich Smetana’s “Dalibor,” that will precede the Martinů festival, July 25-August 3.
Some of the events, including one of the performances of “Dalibor” will be available for livestreaming.
The festival’s annual tie-in book of scholarly essays will be released on August 12, but there will likely already be copies available at the festival.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo258537662.html
It’s past time that American concertgoers and programmers hold Martinů’s music in the same esteem as that of his better-known compatriots, Dvořák, Smetana, and Janáček. Here’s hoping that Bard lends traction to this giant’s seven-league boots.
NOTE: Giant artwork is mine; don’t blame Bard
Fisher Center at Bard
