Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Martinu

  • Bard Music Festival Martinů Deep Dive

    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

  • Bard Music Festival Highlights

    Bard Music Festival Highlights

    All good things must come to an end – but Bard isn’t going without a fight!

    Yet to come on this year’s Bard Music Festival at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: a Sunday morning chamber music concert, “Martinů’s Legacy,” which will include works by Alexander Tcherepnin, Iva Bittová, Chou Wen-chung, Witold Lutoslawski, Frank Zappa (!), Jaroslav Ježek, and Joan Tower, with two pieces of Martinů himself (“Four Songs on Czech Folk Poetry” and the Quartet for Oboe, Violin, Cello, and Piano, first performed by Mitch Miller, later of “Sing Along with Mitch” fame). Then, this afternoon, Martinů’s surrealist opera “Julietta,” in a semi-staged production – all blessed three hours and 15 minutes of it (with two intermissions).

    Friday night was a rough one, but educational. The first half of the program featured Martinů’s music for men’s chorus, including his “Field Mass,” composed for forces (baritone solo, wind instruments, field organ, piano, and percussion) that made performance literally in the field by stationed troops possible (if unlikely). The Czech-language text, by Jiří Mucha (father of artist Alphons Mucha) combines the Lord’s Prayer with soldierly interpolations, supposedly in the style of psalms – I guess if King David would have been moved to write about the hardships of trench warfare and homesickness. On the other hand, appeals for divine assistance in the smiting of one’s enemies is timeless. I concede this work is necessary to experience in order to comprehend the full, wide-ranging variety of the composer’s character and accomplishments.

    But in the company of some not-very-swaggering “Brigand Songs,” in which freebooters (?) seemingly spend more time reflecting on their inevitable fate at the gallows than they do on any kind of carousing, and then part two from “The Prophecy of Isaiah” (Isaiah always good for a few laughs), the cumulative effect was somewhat stupefying. For proper brigandage, give me Szymanowski’s “Harnasie” or even Shostakovich’s “The Execution of Stepan Razin” – with its defiantly laughing severed head – any day. For Isaiah, Walton’s “Belshazzar’s Feast” still reigns supreme (while toppling its blasphemous king).

    The second half was better, or at any rate, more interesting. “Mariken de Nimègue” is the French version of a mystery play that’s part “Faust” and part “Little Red Riding Hood,” with the Devil in the role of Big Bad Wolf. Baritone Tyler Duncan, a Bard staple, is a natural Devil. Soprano Anna Thompson effectively portrayed the conflict and anguish of Mariken, a good girl who sacrifices purity and piety for the simple pleasures of being bad in the big city. In the meantime, there’s a parallel drama between Jesus (bass-baritone Ben Strong), who’s had enough of humanity’s ingratitude and iniquity and is about to break out the divine broadsword, but fortunately is talked down by compassionate Mary (mezzo-soprano Isabelle Kosempa). Actor Bhavesh Patel narrated the action with clear, commanding diction.

    The Bard Festival Chorale, prepared by James Bagwell, was great, as always, and Zachary Schwartzman conducted a mean “Mariken,” but cumulatively, the whole thing just left me feeling wrung out.

    Last night’s concert, on the other hand, was awesome in every sense of the word. Leon Botstein was back on the podium for a mostly-Martinů program. I confess the prospect of Jan Novák’s “Ignis pro Ioanne Palach,” inspired by the self-immolation of student Jan Palach in protest against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, was not exactly cheering; but in execution, it was actually quite good. The music – another work for chorus and orchestra – was direct, powerful, and worthwhile.

    Then mezzo-soprano Taylor Raven took the stage for an aria from Martinů’s one-act opera “Ariane,” which elicited an ecstatic ovation – hard-earned with its high notes – as Raven is a formidable talent.

    Soloist Itamar Zorman played Martinů’s Violin Concerto for all that it was worth. Perhaps more. It was a recording of the slow movement of this piece that inspired festival scholar-in-residence Michael Beckerman to take up study of the composer. I agree with him in that the songful slow movement, marked andante moderato with a virtuosic central section, is the most compelling part of the work, an absolutely gorgeous Czech arioso that pulls the listener in. As always with Martinů, moods shift, but the movement is comparatively untroubled territory, a paradise I wouldn’t mind revisiting.

    But it was the second half of the program that really knocked me back on my heels, as I was totally unprepared for the power of Martinů’s “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” a Mesopotamian blockbuster with women’s and men’s choruses and lots of surprising touches in the orchestration. Martinů’s libretto, based on an English translation of the ancient epic by Reginald Campbell Thompson, focuses on Gilgamesh’s bromance with former rival Enkidu (they bond after a fight so fierce that doors are splintered and walls crumble). Enkidu’s death, precipitated by the gods to humble the hubristic king, leads to an extended denouement in which vocal soloists and chorus attempt to process the concept of mortality. But the work is so inventively scored and the dual choirs so brilliantly employed that it does not outstay its welcome.

    Bard’s performance was enhanced by tasteful projections that did not at all distract from the drama, and in fact put me in the mind of the superb performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Job” that was given in that space a few seasons ago. (That production employed projections based on the William Blake illustrations.)

    More along the lines of RVW’s “Sinfonia antartica” (Italian spelling, with only one “c”), Taylor Raven engaged in a wordless lament. The men, especially baritone Norman Garrett, were left to cycle through loss, disbelief, and fear of the inevitability of death. Bhavesh Patel again narrated.

    This is great work, and I don’t understand why it’s not heard more often. I’ve had a recording of it on my shelf for years, but somehow I’d never gotten around to listening to it. I’m all the happier to have snapped up from the merch table earlier in the day a CD issued by the Bohuslav Martinů Foundation and Institute that includes a 1959 recording of the work, featuring Marilyn Horne and Walter Berry, conducted by Martinů patron Paul Sacher. Something to listen to tonight on the ride home!

    Following another informative panel yesterday morning, with Beckerman, NYU’s Larry Wolff, and artist-in-residence Aleš Březina, that also posited all sorts of interesting ideas, the highlights of yesterday afternoon’s chamber music concert were Martinů’s “Three Madrigals,” with violinist Shannon Lee and violist Luosha Fang (who has left some memorable impressions in her multiple appearances on this festival on her other instrument, the violin), and the Cello Sonata No. 3, with cellist Nicholas Canellakis and pianist Michael Stephen Brown. The program also included David Diamond’s Flute Quintet and Martinů’s Nonet, but the former pieces came off best in yesterday’s performances.

    Chamber music concerts are held in the intimate space of Olin Hall and the larger pieces at the Sosnoff Theater in the campus’ Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

    Okay, I’ve got to run! If this reads as if it was written in haste, it was. I’ll touch it up tomorrow, adding diacritical marks to the Czech names, and post a few other anecdotes and impressions, as I nurse myself back from two weeks’ worth of intensive immersion in the music of this neglected Czech master!

    Fisher Center at Bard

  • Bard Music Fest: Martinů’s World Explored

    Bard Music Fest: Martinů’s World Explored

    I was so self-indulgent in my last post with my impressions of Friday night’s opening concert of the Bard Music Festival (this year, “Martinů and His World”), impressions which somehow wound up being both comprehensive and a mite jejune, I realize that if I continue in that fashion I couldn’t possibly relate everything before the festival commences its second weekend. So for everyone’s sake, I should probably rein it in and restrict myself to the high points and otherwise notable features of this past Saturday and Sunday. It’s good sometimes to have to work within set limitations.

    Saturday morning at Bard is devoted to scholarly panel discussions held at Olin Hall, Bard College’s 300-seat auditorium, where daytime chamber concerts are also performed. These sessions are not only informative, they are entertaining, with back-and-forth between the scholars and an audience Q & A. The better panels, as this one was, are full of wit and personality. The panel consisted of festival scholar-in-residence Michael Beckerman, Cambridge’s Marina Frolova-Walker, and festival co-artistic and music director Leon Botstein, who always manages to steal the show. The moderator was co-artistic director Christopher H. Gibbs. I wish I could share more – I took a lot of notes – but for reasons of concision, I will force myself to refrain.

    With only an hour’s break before the afternoon chamber concert, preceded by the unmissable Byron Adams’ preconcert talk, I was pretty much nailed to the spot, forced to subsist on a Bard torture wrap from the refreshments table – not really horrible as those things go, but not great either. Definitely food on the run. Happily, I made another Bard friend over a chance conversation about American composers. (The festival’s focus in two years will be George Gershwin.) It’s not every day that you find someone who can speak knowledgeably about Ross Lee Finney’s Symphony No. 1 and can share not one, but TWO personal Walter Piston anecdotes. I look forward to speaking with him again this weekend. We’ve already struck up quite the email correspondence.

    One of the high points on the Saturday afternoon chamber concert was the Bassoon Sonatine by Alexandre Tansman, a work that was new to me, really sold by Thomas English, a phenomenal bassoonist, with Danny Driver at the keyboard. Also Martinů’s Flute Sonata, always one of my favorite works by the composer, written on Cape Cod in 1945. This was performed by Brandon Patrick George, whom I remember from his fine performance of a riveting solo flute suite by Egon Wellesz during “Vaughan Williams and His World” in 2023. Again, Danny Driver was the pianist. The program also included attractive works by Josef Suk (an early Piano Quartet), Jaroslav Řídký, Albert Roussel, and one of the few repertory works to be heard during this year’s festival, Maurice Ravel’s Violin Sonata. If all the performers really were outstanding, is it possible to assert that any of them stood out? And yet they did. All of them. I am sorry not to have the space to credit them all here.

    Saturday night’s orchestral program, at the 900-seat Sosnoff Theater in the campus’ Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, was dedicated to Martinů’s friend (the two escaped Europe together) and champion, Rudolf Firkušný, also a valued friend of the Bard Music Festival, appearing as he did as part of “Dvořák and His World,” back in 1993, and honored, following his death, at “Janáček and His World” in 2003. Saturday’s concert included a real rarity in Firkušný’s recently-rediscovered Piano Concertino, written when he was just 17. This was quite the enjoyable showpiece, conceived in a post-Romantic, almost proto-Hollywood idiom. I can understand why he shelved it, when even Rachmaninoff was being ridiculed for this kind of thing, but Firkušný certainly didn’t embarrass himself. The flamboyant Piers Lane reached into his psychedelic wardrobe for a blue sort of tie-dye jacket and what looked like glow-in-the-dark socks. You be you, Piers!

    But even Lane seemed conservative next to Jeonghwan Kim, the gesticulating bleach-blond soloist who tackled Martinů’s fantastical Piano Concerto No. 4, one of several works the composer wrote for Firkušný, which on this occasion certainly lived up to its subtitle, “Incantation.”

    The program opened with Erwin Schulhoff’s Symphony No. 2, full of jazzy inspiration, with solos for trumpet and saxophone, and also a part for banjo. All in all, another delightful Bard discovery.

    The concert also included Martinů’s somber “Memorial to Lidice,” a commemoration of the village and its inhabitants wiped out by the Nazis in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, “Hitler’s Hangman,” by operatives of the Czech resistance, and the Symphony No. 6, subtitled “Fantaisies-symphonique.” The 6th is the composer’s strangest symphony, with its interludes of roiling notes, which remind many listeners – and musicologists too – of swarming bees. Leon Botstein conducted his post-graduate group, The Orchestra Now. Great stuff!

    Sunday’s chamber music concert, hosted by Bard’s scholars-in-residence, Michael Beckerman and Aleš Březina, consisted of works by Martinů and his student/lover Vítězslava Kaprálová. The highlight for me was Martinů’s “Les rondes” – not literally anything to do with rounds, as in “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” but rather an allusion to round-dances. It’s a folk-inflected work, filtered through a Stravinskyan neoclassicism. It’s scored for seven instruments: oboe, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, two violins, and piano.

    I also enjoyed Beckerman and Březina’s introductory attempt to lend authenticity to “Variations on a Slovak Theme,” one of Martinů’s final works, by singing a rough-edged folk duet.

    Perhaps now would be a good time to mention clarinetist Yoonah Kim, who emerged as an artist of real grace and subtlety. She shone not only in “Les rondes” (it was a pleasure to hear here alongside bassoonist Thomas English and oboist Alexandra Knox) but also in Aaron Copland’s Sextet – the composer’s reduction of his “Short Symphony,” undertaken by Copland after it was deemed unplayable by Serge Koussevitzky and Leopold Stokowski (only to have Carlos Chávez prove them wrong), which was among the works featured on the concluding program, back at the Sosnoff. There, Kim sat center stage, before the piano (Piers Lane donning another flashy jacket) and flanked by members of the dynamic Balourdet Quartet.

    Everything about that concluding concert was a joy. The program opened with the suite from Martinů’s “La revue de cuisine,” a 1927 ballet about love and intrigue among the kitchen utensils. Scored for a sextet of clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, violin, cello, and piano, the inner numbers are based on popular dances and flanked by a jaunty, syncopated march. This is fun music. How many ways can I say that all the musicians were superb? It was evident not only here, but in their other appearances throughout the festival.

    Unfortunately, in one of the very few snafus of the weekend, violinist Yuoshang Fang must have gotten her foot tangled up in her dress, or her electronic tablet just didn’t read the signal from her Bluetooth page-turner, and one of the “La revue” movements had to be started over again. This is the 21st century equivalent of when the sheet music used to fall off the stand, and I’ve been waiting for it to happen since these screens have proliferated. That said, it’s the first time I’ve actually witnessed it. It was easily remedied, with a quip from Thomas English and the musicians taking it from the top. Everyone played, and the audience gratefully received it, as if nothing had ever happened.

    This final program had a high ratio of excellent and enjoyable pieces. Orion Weiss played Martinů’s Piano Sonata No. 1. In a bit of luxury casting, Mahan Esfahani was the soloist in Martinu’s Harpsichord Concerto. I’m wondering if this is the first 20th century harpsichord concerto I’ve ever heard live? It can’t be, can it? (Yes, I have heard harpsichords live in Baroque music.) Anyway, I was struck, having learned so much of this repertoire from recordings, how quiet an unamplified harpsichord can be, in relation to the more modern instruments. It was not inaudible. The balance was just unanticipated, as recording engineers are forever boosting the levels. Another fine performance, by the way.

    As the presence of a harpsichord would suggest, there was neoclassicism in abundance. The program also included Arthur Honegger’s delightful “Concerto da Camera,” with Keith Bonner, flute, and Alexandra Knoll, oboe – a pastoral diversion devoid of expressive dissonances of a kind heard in some of the composer’s other pieces (including even his “Christmas Cantata”).

    The last word was given to Martinů and his “Tre ricercari,” its Baroque affinity suggested right there in the title. In all, this was a winning program, again well exceeding the projected two-hour running time.

    The festival has been a little light on the merch this time around. Ordinarily there are tables of CDs offered by Rhinebeck’s Oblong Books, but on the first weekend, anyway, there were no shiny jewel cases to entice the crows. And no, I don’t think it’s because the compact disc is an outmoded format. If you were there in past years, you would know that the inventory gets whittled down quite a bit over the two weekends. I wonder if there was an issue with the store getting stuck having to handle too many returns to the distributors or having to absorb the unsold material into their own inventory. I imagine under normal circumstances, Martinů is not exactly flying off the shelves!

    However, there is still the festival-related book, “Martinů and His World,” edited by scholars-in-residence Beckerman and Březina, which this year includes not only essays about the composer and his works (there’s a healthy section on his operas), but also a recently-rediscovered personal diary and interviews with those who knew him during his American years.

    And of course, there’s the “Martinů and His World” t-shirt, sporting one of the composer’s humorous doodles (really self-caricatures). It’s a keeper, bound to be a conversation-starter (albeit a one-sided conversation). Amaze and zombify your friends!

    What am I especially looking forward to hearing this weekend? “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” for one, with tenor John Matthew Myers, who sang Smetana’s Dalibor last month at Bard (and knocked my socks off as Strauss’ Guntram, also conducted by Botstein, at Carnegie Hall in June), alongside Martinů’s Violin Concerto No. 2, both highlights on Saturday night. Michael Beckerman revealed during this past Saturday’s panel that it was a chance encounter with the slow movement of the concerto on a recording that turned him on to the composer and determined the direction of his life.

    On Saturday afternoon’s chamber music program, I am looking forward to hearing Martinů’s Cello Sonata No. 3 and one of my personal favorites, the Nonet (No. 2). Of the other composer’s works, I eagerly anticipate David Diamond’s Flute Quintet, Witold Lutoslawski’s “Dance Panels,” and Joan Tower’s “Petroushskates.” And to conclude the festival on Sunday afternoon, Martinů’s opera “Julietta,” in a semi-staged production.

    Okay, I ran long again. Kind of like one of Bard’s programs. At least I managed to cram in the rest of the information I wanted to convey. The Bard Music Festival continues this weekend at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. For more information, visit:

    Bard Music Festival

    Fisher Center at Bard

  • Martinů at Bard: Weekend 1 Impressions

    Martinů at Bard: Weekend 1 Impressions

    Okay, here we go: my impressions of this year’s Bard Music Festival, “Martinů and His World,” Weekend 1. If you’re looking for festival background, see yesterday’s post.

    One of the things I’ve always found refreshing about the Bard approach to its honored subject (this year, the chameleonic composer Bohuslav Martinů) is its mix-and-match philosophy of programming. With the exception of Saturday night concerts, for which larger forces are amassed for the duration – an orchestra, with perhaps the addition of soloists and/or a chorus – it’s not uncommon to experience instrumental, vocal, chamber, and orchestral music on the same program.

    Concerts frequently push, and sometimes exceed 150 minutes. At Bard, there is no such thing as too much of a good thing. There is an intermission, of course. Sometimes. This past Sunday morning’s concert ran two hours without break. It was projected to run 90 minutes.

    The Friday night opener took place at Bard College’s 900-seat Sosnoff Theater, inside the Frank Gehry-designed kaiju armadillo that is the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Festival inaugural concerts always serve as introductory affairs, so we were treated to Martinů across various genres and periods.

    The program commenced with Orion Weiss, a pianist whom I’ve heard at Bard pretty much every year since I first encountered him there in 2008, during “Prokofiev and His World.” That would have been my first visit to the festival, which was established in 1990. Throughout the weekend, Weiss exhibited a remarkable grasp of the Martinů idiom. For starters, he played two selections (both in F major) from the composer’s “Etudes and Polkas.” I would have liked to have heard more of these, so delectable they were. I’ve enjoyed them very much on record. But on Friday, they were mere appetizers.

    As was the folk-inflected “Primrose,” a collection of five brief, though characterful songs for two voices, violin (an inspired choice on the part of the composer), and piano. This is music with roots in the soil of Moravia and shoots in the New World. The vocal duets were sung by soprano Jana McIntrye and mezzo-soprano Taylor Raven, with foundations and embellishments provided by violinist Luosha Fang and pianist Erika Switzer.

    In browsing the promotional material during the weeks and months leading up to the festival, it did not register that the third work on the program, titled “Fantasia,” was indeed Martinů’s Fantasia for Theremin, Oboe, String Quartet, and Piano. If you don’t know the theremin, it’s that electronic instrument often used in old science fiction movies to denote UFOs and mad science. Tones are conjured and bent without physical contact by manipulating electromagnetic fields with hands held in varying proximities to the machine’s dual antennae. You have to give Martinů credit for employing this most unusual device for its musical capabilities, as opposed to gimmicky ends.

    Believe it or not, this is not the first time I’ve encountered the piece. I heard it performed in 2013 by the Concordia Chamber Players with the New Jersey Symphony’s Darryl Kubian on the theremin. Granted, that was in a more intimate venue (Trinity Church in Solebury, PA), but the instrument, and by extension the work itself, made more of an impression on that occasion. That said, I must confess, despite some intriguing interplay between the theremin and the oboe, for me the piece kind of outstays its welcome. But not by much. Maybe I’m just one of those vulgarians who actually craves more mad science. On Friday, Dorit Chrysler was the thereminist. She shared the stage with oboist Alexandra Knoll, the Balourdet Quartet, and again, pianist Orion Weiss.

    The first half of the concert concluded with Weiss and members of the Balourdet in a profoundly absorbing performance of Martinů’s Piano Quartet No. 1. This is a work of urgency and uncertainty that yet manages to attain real beauty with its flashes of irrepressible humanity. In my notebook, I jotted down the impression that Shostakovich might have recognized the emotional soundscape of the work’s second movement. A ray of hope appears in the third, and it occurred to me, perhaps quirkily, that Martinů’s piano passages, when he is in hopeful mode, put me in the mind, somewhat, of Vince Guaraldi’s “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” if only in spirit. I mean that generally, not just in this piece. But Martinů is never the same for long. As it was, hope was not to continue untroubled, and peace was not guaranteed. Optimism pierced the gloom, shining sporadically, like shafts of light through clouds.

    For me, this was the high-point of the program thus far, and perhaps it would have carried the evening, had it not been for the Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano, and Timpani. Positioned as it was after interval, on top of everything else, the Double Concerto had the advantage of contrast with the smaller-scale works on the concert’s first half, which enhanced its impact enormously. As I observed in yesterday’s post, it was like the effect of having viewed a 35 mm film and then having the screen suddenly open up to the dimensions of Cinemascope.

    The visual of pianist Michael Stephen Brown seated in an antiheroic position, behind the instrument, the piano perpendicular in relation to the seats in the auditorium, so that hands and keys were invisible to the audience, emphasized his neoclassical function as a musician in, as opposed to apart from, the orchestra, as in a Baroque concerto grosso. But there was nothing remotely 18th century about the content of the music, with its white hot divisi strings ratcheting up the intensity. I own several recordings of the Double Concerto, but it wasn’t until I heard it live in concert, here for the first time, that I realized what an outstanding work it truly is. Again, as I remarked yesterday, this is searing, full-bodied music that can stand toe-to-toe with the finest works of Béla Bartók. Music director Leon Botstein (also Bard’s co-artistic director) and the young musicians of The Orchestra Now, Bard’s graduate training ensemble, gave it as fine a performance as I ever expect to hear.

    In the wake of this emotionally-taxing work and the staggering success of its execution, I was all set to decompress with the Symphony No. 2, one of the composer’s more carefree inspirations. It’s a piece that bears the influence of Martinů’s Czech antecedents (especially Dvorak), but also conjures the kind of wide-open positivity we associate with a lot of American music of the era. By then, 1943, Martinů was safely across the Atlantic and composing in the United States. The work was written for the Czech community of Cleveland and first performed by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Erich Leinsdorf.

    To be fair, Botstein and his musicians had set the bar awfully high. So when the symphony commenced, my heart sank a little, as I began to suffer flashbacks to a performance of Charles Ives’ Symphony 2 these same forces had given last season at Carnegie Hall that just refused to spring to life. One of my favorite American symphonies wound up sounding like John Knowles Paine on a bad day. I feared a recurrence on Friday, with the first movement of the Martinů symphony played, to my ears, with more diffidence than such a characterful, optimistic piece should have been. It lacked forward momentum, which is not something you generally experience with this composer.

    Or at least, that was my impression. Who knows. Maybe it was just me. (I HAD eaten some undercooked salmon for dinner.)

    HOWEVER, I am very happy to report, things improved markedly in the second movement, which of course could handle a more relaxed tempo. The third movement, lively in its mechanized energy, was better still. It made me wonder if my reaction to the first was but “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.” The last movement was exuberant, exciting, and ebullient. The performance had rebounded – possibly; again I concede that it could have been fine all along – and the work was brought to a satisfying close. Not quite on the level of the Double Concerto, mind you, but still, a job well-done.

    At various points throughout the concert, Botstein offered some remarks while the stage was being reset. The man is a master of extemporization. If you’re ever looking to fill five, ten, or even thirty minutes with engaging perambulation, then Botstein is your man. A lifetime of public speaking and a devotion of one’s thoughts to interesting things will do that. Before the concert, he was presented with a framed certificate by New York Assemblymember Didi Barrett in honor of his 50 years as president of Bard College.

    Apologies. This is getting long again. I’ll have to wrap it up tomorrow, likely in a more concise fashion. Otherwise, I’ll never get it all in before Weekend 2!

    The Bard Music Festival, “Martinů and His World,” will continue this weekend at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. For more information, visit

    Bard Music Festival

    Fisher Center at Bard

  • Martinů and His World Bard Music Festival

    Martinů and His World Bard Music Festival

    Here’s a little teaser about the 35th Bard Music Festival, “Martinů and His World,” which will take place at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, August 8-10 and 14-17.

    https://www.facebook.com/reel/1247374413423449

    As a bonus, I’m also including links (below) to a few works that will be featured on this year’s concerts, to give you an idea what to expect. Of course, a lot of other composers’ music will be performed, as well. This is Martinů AND HIS WORLD, remember. The programs come pretty fast and furious at Bard. It’s a lot to take in, but you know I’ll do my best to report here on what I can.

    If the promo’s music bed intrigues you, it’s from “The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca.” The audio is excerpted from an earlier Bard concert, but the work itself is not scheduled for this year’s festival. All the same, I’ll include a link to that too.

    But first, more about the Bard Music Festival:

    Bard Music Festival

    Fisher Center at Bard

    Nonet

    Cello Sonata No. 3

    “La revue de cuisine” (ballet about kitchen utensils!)

    Symphony No. 6 “Fantaisies symphoniques”

    “The Epic of Gilgamesh”

    “Les fresques de Piero della Francesca”

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