Classic Ross Amico

Tag: The Orchestra Now

Bard Music Festival Serendipity: Vaughan Williams & More

Another serendipitous reunion at the Bard Music Festival: for Saturday night’s concert, who else should be sitting in my row, but Warren Cohen, music director of the MusicaNova Orchestra!

The orchestra is based in Phoenix, Arizona, but Warren makes his home in New Jersey, which is why he was able to make the trip down to the studios of Princeton University’s WPRB, to share with me his experiences with English composer Richard Arnell and his works (of which he has conducted many), for Arnell’s centenary in 2017. It was an all-Arnell morning, which featured several of Warren’s recordings with his orchestra. I feel comfortable stating that Warren is a huge advocate of unusual and neglected repertoire, with a special fondness for English music. Remind you of anyone?

Anyway, here we are during intermission on Saturday, Warren, holding a copy of the lavish Bard Music Festival program, and me, with this year’s tie-in volume of scholarly essays, “Vaughan Williams and His World,” published by University of Chicago Press.

The concert itself was a Vaughan Williams enthusiast’s dream, featuring “Job, A Masque for Dancing” (with projections of William Blake’s artwork), the Concerto for Two Pianos (with soloists Danny Driver and Piers Lane), and the turbulent Symphony No. 4. Leon Botstein conducted The Orchestra Now (TŌN). Good luck ever hearing “Job” in the United States, or the concerto anywhere!

The Bard Music Festival will resume this weekend at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, with a couple of special supplementary events taking place at Church of the Messiah in Rhinebeck on Thursday evening and Friday afternoon.

Impending highlights from Bard’s marathon programs will include Vaughan Williams’ “Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus,” “Flos Campi,” and “The Lark Ascending” (alongside works by Edward Elgar, Grace Williams, Peter Warlock, Frederick Delius, and Gustav Holst, on Friday evening), the String Quartet No. 2 (alongside works by Gordon Jacob, Robert Müller-Hartmann, Egon Wellesz, Arnold Bax, Howard Ferguson, Béla Bartók, Edmund Rubbra, and a Bach transcription by Harriet Cohen, on Saturday afternoon), the Symphony No. 8 and “Sinfonia Antartica” (alongside works by Elizabeth Maconchy, William Walton, and Jean Sibelius, on Saturday evening), the Violin Sonata in A minor (alongside works by Ruth Gipps, Michael Tippett, Samuel Barber, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, and Constant Lambert, on Sunday morning), and the Falstaff opera “Sir John in Love” (Sunday afternoon).

Some of the concerts will be livestreamed. You’ll find the complete schedule here:

https://fishercenter.bard.edu/whats-on/programs/bard-music-festival/

Fisher Center at Bard

Warren Cohen conducts Richard Arnell’s Symphony No. 4:

Warren joins me in 2017 to talk about Arnell on WPRB:

MusicaNova’s website:

https://musicanovaaz.org/

Who else will I encounter at Bard?

August 10, 2023
Bard Music Festival: Vaughan Williams Immersion

Here’s some of the merch from this year’s Bard Music Festival. Of course, I already own most of the CDs. A particularly nice showing for those on Albion Records, the recording branch of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society. Attractive design for the festival t-shirt, with a lark ascending, naturally, against a background of sky blue. I’m not a t-shirt guy, but I picked one up for the archive. Reading Eric Saylor’s Vaughan Williams book now. Saylor is one of this year’s resident scholars.

Of this past weekend’s concerts, Saturday night was the clear champion, with The Orchestra Now (TŌN) performing “Job, A Masque for Dancing” (with projections of the Blake illustrations), the Concerto for Two Pianos (with Danny Driver and Piers Lane the soloists), and the Symphony No. 4. Co-artistic director Leon Botstein conducted. “Job,” in particular, was sublime. Orchestras in the United States should hang their heads in shame for not programming this music.

Friday evening too had its rewards. I never much cared for Vaughan Williams’ “Concerto Accademico” on record, but hearing it played in person, with Grace Park the violinist, made me a convert. The “Serenade to Music” was luminously transcendent. The vocal soloists were all excellent, but soprano Brandie Sutton took it to the next level. What a presence, and what a voice!

It was also an inspired idea to open the festival with a communal singing of Vaughan Williams’ hymn “Down Ampney” (“Come Down, O Love Divine”), as one of the composer’s great achievements was his revitalization of the “The English Hymnal.” The man truly left his imprint on every musical facet of his time.

The Saturday morning panel, “Composer and Nation,” was also very special, with Saylor, Botstein, and Princeton University’s Deborah Nord participating. The discussion was moderated by Richard Aldous. The Bard Music Festival rewards on many levels, paying dividends on however much one decides to invest in it. If you’re there to take in some concerts of largely underexposed music, there’s plenty to enjoy. But if you want to dig a little deeper, the panels and pre-concert talks can be both absorbing and rewarding, and Saturday morning’s was among the best I’ve attended.

The daytime chamber concerts brought many pleasures, including exemplary performances of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Clarinet Quintet (with clarinetist Todd Palmer) and Herbert Howells’ Piano Quartet (with pianist Danny Driver). Nicholas Phan was on hand yesterday afternoon to sing Vaughan Williams’ “On Wenlock Edge” (with pianist Piers Lane). All three works featured members of the Ariel Quartet, surely the hardest-working chamber ensemble at this year’s festival.

Next weekend’s concerts are primed to be a series of “Holy Grails” for fans of the composer. Featured highlights will include a concert of English string classics, RVW’s Symphony No. 8 and “Sinfonia Antartica” [sic], and the Falstaff opera “Sir John in Love.” Of course, there will be plenty of chamber music during the day. This year, there will also be a couple of supplementary concerts held at the Church of the Messiah in Rhinebeck on Thursday evening and Friday afternoon (including a performance of the Mass in G minor).

“Vaughan Williams and His World” continues at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, through August 13. You’ll find the complete schedule at the link.

https://fishercenter.bard.edu/whats-on/programs/bard-music-festival/

More photos tomorrow!

Fisher Center at Bard

August 7, 2023
Dawson & Shostakovich Symphonies Stream Free

My pick for most awesome stream of the weekend? This double-bill from the Fisher Center at Bard College of knock-out mid-century symphonies by William Levi Dawson and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony” was first performed by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1934. The composer extensively revised the piece after a trip to West Africa in 1952. Stokowski was the first to record it, but chances to experience it in concert have been few.

Shostakovich composed his Symphony No. 7, the “Leningrad,” as a display of hope and defiance during the Nazi siege of the city in 1941. The work was given its premiere in Moscow, by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra. It was next performed in the West, in London (by Henry Wood) and New York City (by Toscanini), after the score was smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm, by way of Tehran!

The symphony was finally performed in Leningrad itself on August 9, 1942, with the concert blasted on loudspeakers into the enemy lines after three thousand high-caliber shells had been lobbed into the Germans. Furthermore, Shostakovich employed a grotesque quotation from Hitler’s favorite operetta, “The Merry Widow,” to mock the Nazi “invasion.”

The “Leningrad Symphony” enjoyed tremendous popularity during the war years, but in the decades since, its musical merits have tended to be overshadowed by its propagandistic origins.

This weekend’s concerts will be played by The Orchestra Now (TŌN) under the direction of Leon Botstein. The concerts will take place on Saturday evening at 8 pm and Sunday afternoon at 2 pm EDT.

Tickets are available in-house at the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. For those of us at home, the concert will stream free. Make your reservation here:

Shostakovich & Dawson

September 10, 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

Tag Cloud

RECENT POSTS