Bard Music Festival Explores Life and Times of Romantic Master Fryderyk Chopin (Aug 11–20) as Centerpiece of 2017 Bard SummerScape Festival

“A highlight of the musical year” – Wall Street Journal

Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. – This summer, the Bard Music Festival trains its focus on a composer who wrote almost exclusively for the piano – still the instrument most prevalent in Western culture today – with a two-week, in-depth exploration of “Chopin and His World.” In twelve themed concert programs, complemented by pre-concert lectures, panel discussions, two special events, and expert commentary, Bard examines Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49), a true original who did more than any other composer to transform the aesthetic potential of his instrument. Offering an immersion in Parisian culture and Polish politics, Weekend One investigates Chopin, the Piano, and Musical Culture of the 19th Century (August 11–13), while Weekend Two explores the nature of his Originality and Influence (August 18–20). Enriched by a wealth of compositions from Chopin’s predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, all events take place in the striking Frank Gehry-designed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on Bard College’s glorious Hudson River campus where, as in previous seasons, the 28th annual Bard Music Festival is set not only to provide the creative inspiration for Bard SummerScape 2016, but also to prove itself once again “the summer’s most stimulating music festival” (Los Angeles Times).

As the New York Times observes, “Over two decades, the Bard Music Festival has managed more than its fair share of ambitious feats in its immersive annual examinations of classical music’s major composers,” offering a “rich web of context” for a full appreciation of that composer’s inspirations and significance. For festival co-founder and co-artistic director Leon Botstein – “one of the most remarkable figures in the worlds of arts and culture” (THIRTEEN/WNET) – the present season holds especial meaning. He explains:

“This year’s Chopin festival probably carries the most autobiographical resonance for me. I grew up in a Polish Jewish family in which Chopin was revered as symbolizing the best of the historical Poland.“

Click here to see Botstein talk about Chopin.

Now in his 24th year as music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, Botstein will lead the ensemble in both its Bard Music Festival appearances. He also helms The Orchestra Now (TŌN); currently in its second season, this unique graduate training orchestra – designed to help a new generation of musicians break down barriers between modern audiences and great orchestral music of past and present – will perform on several programs, including the closing concert of the festival. As in previous seasons, the Bard Festival Chorale will take part in all choral works under the leadership of James Bagwell, and this year’s chamber and vocal programs boast an impressive roster of guest artists. Joining festival favorites Anna Polonsky and Orion Weiss are a host of pianists who include Danny Driver, Benjamin Hochman, and Brian Zeger. Other instrumentalists include two-time Grammy-nominated violinist Jesse Mills, and among this year’s vocalists are soprano Amanda Majeski and mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford.

The contradictory figure of Fryderyk Chopin

Even during his brief lifetime, which coincided with one of the most important periods in the evolution of the modern piano, Chopin was regarded as the quintessential poet of his instrument. Drawing on the latest developments in piano making, he conjured new harmonies, colors, and expressive depths from his instrument, exerting a profound and indelible influence on piano technique and harmonic language for generations to come. A salient feature of Chopin’s distinctive sound is his predilection for the folk melodies and dance forms of his native Poland. He came to be seen as the voice of this dismembered and oppressed nation, and he remains a cherished national icon in Poland today. Yet, half-French by birth and one of the many Poles who went into exile during the Great Emigration, he spent his maturity in Paris, where he was a leading member of the émigré community. It is there that his body lies buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, even while his heart was returned to the Warsaw of his youth, and interred in the Church of the Holy Cross.

This contradiction is one of the many that abound when trying to make sense of Chopin and his legacy. A great Romantic himself, the composers he revered most highly were Bach and Mozart. A leading nationalist, his work is consistently celebrated – perhaps most notably, in Asia – as universal. The writer of profoundly introspective music, he nonetheless cultivated a distinctive kind of keyboard virtuosity. An important political figure, his music remains deeply personal. Shy and plagued by stage fright, he gave fewer than three-dozen public concerts, yet his personal life was the stuff of scandal, intrigue, and Hollywood film. Despite his short lifetime, the modest number of his surviving works, his preference for short single-movement compositions, and indeed his own diminutive frame, he continues to loom large on the musical landscape. As The Guardian asks, “Who is the real Chopin? Salon-bound miniaturist or national icon? And how does his music speak to us today?”

Chopin and His World (Aug 11–20)

Drawing on recent scholarship, the Bard Music Festival’s signature thematic programming, multidisciplinary approach, and emphasis on context and reception history provide the perfect platform for a reexamination of these contradictions. Through the prism of Chopin’s life and career, the festival investigates the Polish and Parisian worlds he straddled, with twelve concert programs spaced over the two weekends to address such themes as the influence of bel canto opera on instrumental writing, the consequences of emancipation for Chopin’s Jewish contemporaries, differing views on virtuosity, Poland’s neglected choral tradition, and Chopin’s great legacy, which helped shape the future of music.

As well as a broad sampling of Chopin’s own work – from canonical favorites, like his Op. 10 Études, to comparative rarities, like his songs – music by many of his compatriots and contemporaries will be heard. These include Poles like Maria Szymanowska and Karol Lipiński; his primary teacher, Józef Elsner; his fellow virtuosos, including Paganini, Liszt, and Sigismond Thalberg; the operatic masters who inspired him, like Donizetti, Bellini, Meyerbeer, Halévy, Rossini, and Weber; and those he himself would influence, from Schumann and Brahms to Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Fauré, and Poland’s Szymanowski, Wieniawski, and Paderewski. Two of the early works for piano and orchestra that propelled him to fame will be heard alongside rarely programmed examples of the concertos he knew and played, by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, and Ferdinand Ries. Finally, to draw the festival – and the entire seven weeks of SummerScape – to a climactic close, Bard presents a pairing of masterworks by Chopin and Berlioz: two friends who nonetheless took very different approaches to musical Romanticism.

Weekend One: Chopin, the Piano, and Musical Culture of the 19th Century (August 11–13)

Bard’s twelve musical programs, built thematically and spaced over two August weekends, open with Program 1, “The Genius of Chopin,” the first of two all-Chopin performances. Exploiting the festival’s unusual ability to vary the traditional concert format by integrating solo, vocal, and orchestral works within a single event, the program provides an overview of the composer’s all-too-brief career. Highlights include the beloved F-minor Piano Concerto, one of Chopin’s teenage masterpieces; rarely heard songs set to texts by the Polish poets he most favored; and his Variations on “Là ci darem la mano” from Don Giovanni, in the original version for piano and orchestra. It was this work that prompted the young Schumann to exclaim: “Hats off gentlemen, a genius!” and which – when Chopin played it to cap his Parisian debut – would serve as his passport to Europe.

Anchored by an ensemble drawn from TŌN, Program 2, “Chopin and Warsaw,” pairs some of Chopin’s early compositions – including his Piano Trio – with music by those composers most prominent in the Warsaw of his youth. These included Karol Lipiński, whose violin writing would inform Chopin’s own melodic style; Chopin’s close musical associate Karol Kurpiński; and his teacher Józef Elsner, the German founder of the Warsaw Conservatory, whose elegant Classicism exerted a profound influence on the younger composer. The program features a rare live performance of Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s Second Piano Concerto, a work Chopin played under Elsner’s tutelage and subsequently drew upon in his own concerto writing.

As a staunch bel canto enthusiast, Chopin used to tell his piano students, “You have to sing if you wish to play.” Bard explores the relationship between operatic and instrumental writing in Program 3, “From the Opera House to the Concert Hall” – the American Symphony Orchestra’s first concert of the Bard Music Festival season – with rarely heard orchestral works by such operatic masters as Spohr, Bellini, Weber, and Meyerbeer, who is represented by the ballet from Robert le diable, the opera that led Chopin to pronounce him immortal. The concert concludes with the superb third act from Rossini’s Otello, a once hugely influential work that has too long been overshadowed by Verdi’s later treatment of the same Shakespearean tragedy.

In Program 4, “The Piano in the 19th Century,” returning festival favorite Piers Lane presents one of his signature performances with commentary, offering from the keyboard a guided tour of the Romantic piano from Chopin to Rachmaninoff. A pianist for whom “no praise could be high enough” (Gramophone), Lane is a leading expert on his instrument who served as Artistic Director of the 2016 Sydney International Piano Competition, and wrote and presented BBC Radio 3’s 54-part series The Piano.

The Age of Enlightenment saw the abolition of discriminatory laws against Jews in France, and eventually across much of Europe. As a result, Chopin’s generation was the first to feature a number of prominent Jewish musicians, several of whom – despite the anti-Semitism revealed in his correspondence – he counted among his friends and associates. Program 5, “The Consequences of Emancipation: Chopin’s Jewish Contemporaries” juxtaposes works that the Polish-born composer dedicated to Jewish patrons and students, like the masterful Ballade in F minor, with those by such Jewish acquaintances as Mendelssohn, Charles-Valentin Alkan, his close friend Ferdinand Hiller, and Ignaz Moscheles, a rare account of whose Third Piano Concerto concludes the concert.

Hand in hand with this rise in religious tolerance went a newfound focus on the individual, as exemplified by the virtuoso cult that swept Europe. In place of the performer as humble servant of the music came superstar soloists who enjoyed the status of heroes. And yet, as Program 6, “Virtuosity and Its Discontents” discovers, most had mixed feelings about their virtuosity. Schumann openly considered the movement philistine; Chopin, for all his facility at the keyboard, favored delicacy and nuance over fireworks; and even Liszt, the quintessential virtuoso, could also compose more introspective pieces like the meditative Consolation in D-flat. Nonetheless, Chopin admired the preternatural dexterity not only of Liszt and Paganini, but also of Friedrich Kalkbrenner, dedicatee of his E-minor Concerto, whose own Piano Concerto in D minor was designed to showcase its creator’s superhuman skills.

Weekend Two: Originality and Influence (August 18–20)

To launch Weekend Two, Bard presents a group of pianists in Program 7, “Chopin and the Piano,” which celebrates the composer’s artistry through a generous sampling of his most important contributions to the repertoire. These include six of his trailblazing Études, which mark the apogee of the pedagogic form; the Sonata in B-flat minor, showing the influence of Bach in its polyphony and Beethoven in its famous Funeral March; and the enduringly popular Polonaise in A-flat and Op. 59 Mazurka, in which Chopin took two of his favorite traditional Polish dances as the inspiration for his most subtle and daring originality.

Unlike Liszt, who thrived on public performance, Chopin suffered from stage fright and avoided it whenever possible. Thus, first in Warsaw and then in Paris, he played most often at salons, the social gatherings that served as an engine of the Enlightenment. Program 8, “Chopin and the Salon” presents examples of his waltzes and ballades alongside the salon music he encountered by such figures as his fellow Pole Maria Szymanowska; his friends, mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot and cellist Auguste Franchomme; the lyrical Irish composer John Field, whose Nocturnes provided the inspiration for his own; Clara Wieck Schumann, whom he considered “the only woman in Germany who can play my music”; and Ferdinand Ries, whose Chopinesque Third Piano Concerto was one of those Chopin played himself.

Józef Elsner was one of several who explicitly expressed the hope that Chopin would be the one to write Poland’s first great opera, but that distinction fell instead to his contemporary Stanisław Moniuszko. Program 9, “The Polish National Opera: Halka” presents the American Symphony Orchestra in an all-too-rare semi-staged performance of Halka, the four-act masterwork that ensured Moniuszko’s legacy as the father of Polish opera. A story of love and betrayal set to a politically charged libretto by Włodzimierz Wolski, a poet with radical social views, Halka is regularly performed in Poland but virtually unknown abroad, despite being “melodious, affecting and appealing: … a rare treat” (Washington Post). Starring soprano Amanda Majeski in the title role, Halka will be directed by Mary Birnbaum, with scenic design by Grace Laubacher and lighting design by Anshuman Bhatia, the creative team behind last year’s double-bill of Le Villi and La Navarraise.

Both Chopin’s native Poland and his adopted France boasted choral traditions rich in liturgical and political music. Anchored by the Bard Festival Chorale, Program 10, “From the Sacred to the Revolutionary: Choral Works from Poland and France,” samples music spanning four centuries, from sacred compositions by Polish Baroque master Grzegorz Gorczycki to works by Chopin’s fellow Parisians. These include his friend Luigi Cherubini, the city’s leading composer during the Revolution; Auber, who succeeded Cherubini as director of the Paris Conservatoire; and Halévy – teacher of Gounod, Bizet, and Saint-Saëns – whose Shiru ladonai shir chadash is one of the masterworks of the Jewish synagogue liturgy.

Chopin’s influence on his fellow composers led some to pen explicit tributes, like the movement Schumann named for him in Carnaval, and the Études Debussy dedicated to his memory. Others were inspired to try their hand at forms he had made famous, Szymanowski writing Mazurkas, Grieg a Nocturne, and Wieniawski the Polonaise brillante in D. In the advanced chromaticism and melodic innovations of his musical language, however, Chopin also made a more profound impact, as songs by Rachmaninoff, and piano pieces by Brahms, Scriabin, and Fauré, bear witness. Program 11, “Chopin’s Influence,” investigates this lasting legacy, before concluding with Chopin’s own final chamber work, the G-minor Cello Sonata that he requested on his deathbed.

Although he was one of the Romantic era’s leading lights, in many respects Chopin was less representative of the period than the dominant Parisian composer of the day, his sometime friend Berlioz. The two could not have been more different in their approach. Berlioz was one of the few who didn’t write at the keyboard, whereas Chopin never composed anywhere else. While Berlioz made orchestration his primary focus and published an influential treatise on the subject, Chopin’s has often been considered expendable. Similarly, where Chopin favored Bach and Mozart, and took care to avoid descriptive titles and extra-musical allusions, Berlioz preferred Beethoven, pioneered program music, and drew frequently on literary inspiration.

To illustrate these differences, the season’s final concert, Program 12, “Shared Passions, Different Paths,” pairs two contemporary orchestral works, each equally characteristic of its creator. From its starkly unaccompanied opening, the supremacy of the piano is never in doubt in Chopin’s delicately uplifting Andante spianato and Grande Polonaise. Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette, by contrast, is an epic Beethovenian choral symphony that closely follows its Shakespearean source, and is scored for soloists, choir, and an expanded orchestra. In their contrasting ways, the two works represent Romanticism at its finest, providing a fitting end to Bard’s probing and far-reaching festival.

Supplementary events and forthcoming publication

Besides the twelve concert programs, there will be a special event presenting the New York Wind Symphony in a pairing of works by two of Chopin’s Parisian contemporaries –Gounod’s Petite symphonie and Berlioz’s Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale – and a concert curated by Bard Music West exploring Chopin’s influences. Two free panel discussions – “Chopin: Real and Imagined” and “The Piano in Society, Culture, and Politics” – will be supplemented by twelve informative pre-concert talks, free to ticket-holders, to illuminate each program’s themes. Bard’s highly popular European Spiegeltent will be open for lunch and dinner throughout “Chopin and His World,” besides playing host to John Cage’s Musicircus (August 13); cabaret performances by Rebecca Havemeyer, Dane Terry, and Christeene (August 12); and a performance by returning host, emcee, and guest curator Mx. Justin Vivian Bond (August 19).

Since the founding of the Bard Music Festival with 1990’s “Brahms and His World,” Princeton University Press has published a companion volume of new scholarship and interpretation each season, with essays and translated documents relating to the featured composer and his milieu. Scholars-in-Residence Halina Goldberg, author of Music in Chopin’s Warsaw, and Jonathan Bellman, who recently published Chopin’s Polish Ballade: Op. 38 as Narrative of National Martyrdom, are the editors of the forthcoming 2017 volume, Chopin and His World.

Acclaim for the Bard Music Festival

The New York Times observes, “The Bard Music Festival has managed more than its fair share of ambitious feats in its immersive annual examinations of classical music’s major composers.” Since its inception, Botstein and the festival have infused the standard concert repertory with a host of important rediscoveries. As the New Yorker’s Alex Ross puts it, “Bard SummerScape and Bard Music Festival always unearth piles of buried treasure.” And while the Bard Music Festival’s pioneering approach to thematic programming has sometimes been emulated, “Nothing quite compares to the fascinating summer programs popping out of Leon Botstein’s brain” (Bloomberg News).

Dubbed “part boot camp for the brain, part spa for the spirit” (New York Times), the music festival consistently impresses critics worldwide. NPR named it “one of the ‘10 Can’t-Miss Classical Music Festivals,’” the Los Angeles Times considers it “the summer’s most stimulating music festival,” and on his blog, veteran journalist Steve Smith confessed:

“For an unrepentant music geek like me, the Bard Music Festival is simply irresistible: a fabulous wealth of music by a major composer from the classical tradition, surrounded and contextualized with works by forebears, peers, colleagues, friends, enemies, students, followers – you name it.”

In the New Yorker, Alex Ross commented: “At Bard, the talks and panels are nearly as well attended as the concerts: this audience wants to think about the music, not merely bathe in it.” As the Wall Street Journal’s Barrymore Laurence Scherer affirmed:

“The Bard Music Festival … no longer needs an introduction. Under the provocative guidance of the conductor-scholar Leon Botstein, it has long been one of the most intellectually stimulating of all American summer festivals and frequently is one of the most musically satisfying.”

Getting to the Bard Music Festival: NYC round-trip bus transportation

Round-trip bus service is provided exclusively to ticket-holders for the performances marked with an asterisk below (Programs 1, 6, 9, and 12). A reservation is required, and may be made by calling the box office at 845-758-7900. The round-trip fare is $40, and the bus departs from Lincoln Center. Further details are available at fishercenter.bard.edu/transportation.

This season of the Bard Music Festival is made possible in part through the generous support of the Board of the Bard Music Festival and the Friends of the Fisher Center, as well as grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Additional underwriting has been provided by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, James H. Ottaway Jr., Felicitas S. Thorne, Helen and Roger Alcaly, Bettina Baruch Foundation, and the Jane W. Nuhn Charitable Trust. Special support has also been provided by the Mrs. Mortimer Levitt Endowment Fund for the Performing Arts and the donors to the BMF Mellon Challenge.

http://fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf/
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Program details of Bard Music Festival, “Chopin and His World”

WEEKEND ONE: Chopin, the Piano, and Musical Culture of the 19th Century
Friday, August 11
PROGRAM ONE*
The Genius of Chopin
Sosnoff Theater
7:30 pm Preconcert Talk: Leon Botstein
8 pm Performance*: Katarzyna Sądej, mezzo-soprano; Benjamin Hochman & Orion Weiss, piano; The Orchestra Now, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director; and others
Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49)
Variations on “Là ci darem la mano,” Op. 2 (1827)
Piano Concerto in F minor, Op. 21 (1829)
Preludes, Op. 28 (1831–38)
Polonaise-Fantaisie, Op. 61 (1845–46)
Songs
Tickets: $25–$60

Saturday, August 12
PANEL ONE
Chopin: Real and Imagined
Olin Hall
10 am–noon
Free and open to the public

PROGRAM TWO
Chopin and Warsaw
Olin Hall
1 pm Preconcert Talk: Jeffrey Kallberg
1:30 pm Performance: Danny Driver & Anna Polonsky, piano; Jesse Mills, violin; Horszowski Trio; members of The Orchestra Now
Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49)
Polonaise in B-flat minor, Op. posth. (1826)
Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello in G minor, Op. 8 (1828)
Józef Elsner (1769-1854)
Sonata in D (1798)
Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837)
Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 85 (1816)
Karol Kurpiński (1785-1857)
Fantasia Chwila snu okropnego (1816/1820)
Wilhelm Würfel (1790-1832)
Grande fantaisie lugubre, Op. 18 (1818)
Karol Lipiński (1790-1861)
Violin Concerto No. 3 (1835?)
Maria Szymanowska (1789-1831)
Etude in C and Polonaise in F minor (n.d.)
Tickets: $40

PROGRAM THREE
From the Opera House to the Concert Hall
Sosnoff Theater
7 pm Preconcert Talk: James Parakilas
8 pm Performance: Nicole Cabell, soprano; Jenni Bank, mezzo-soprano; Issachah Savage, tenor; Alexandra Knoll, oboe; American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director
Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49)
Fantasy on Polish Airs, Op. 13 (1828)
Louis Spohr (1784-1859)
Overture to Faust (1816)
Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)
Symphony No. 1 in C (1807; rev. 1810)
Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864)
Ballet from Robert le diable (1831)
Vincenzo Bellini (1801-35)
Oboe Concerto (c. 1825)
Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868)
Act 3 from Otello (1816)
Tickets: $25–$75

Sunday, August 13
PROGRAM FOUR
The Piano in the 19th Century
Olin Hall
10 am Performance with Commentary, with Piers Lane, piano
Works by Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49); Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943); and others
Tickets: $40

PROGRAM FIVE
The Consequences of Emancipation: Chopin’s Jewish Contemporaries
Olin Hall
1 pm Preconcert Talk: Leon Botstein
1:30 pm Performance: Tyler Duncan, baritone; Michael Brown, Danny Driver, Simon Ghraichy, Erika Switzer & Orion Weiss, piano; members of The Orchestra Now, conducted by Benjamin Hochman
Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49)
Ballade No. 4, Op. 52 (1842)
Waltz, Op. 64, No. 2 (1846-47)
Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870)
Concerto No. 3 in G minor, Op. 58 (1820)
Henri Herz (1803-88)
Rondo Turc, Op. 85, No. 4 (1835)
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-47)
Prelude and Fugue in E minor, Op. 35 (1827/1841)
Ferdinand Hiller (1811-85)
Alla memoria di Vincenzo Bellini (1885)
Sigismond Thalberg (1812-71)
Fantaisie sur Andante finale de Lucia di Lammermoor, Op. 44 (1842)
Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-88)
From 25 Preludes, Op. 31 (1847)
Songs on texts by Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), by Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864), Robert Schumann (1810-56), and Franz Liszt (1811-86)
Tickets: $40

PROGRAM SIX*
Virtuosity and Its Discontents
Sosnoff Theater
4:30 pm Preconcert Talk
5 pm Performance*: Cecilia Violetta López, soprano; Piers Lane and Brian Zeger, piano; Dongfang Ouyang, violin; members of The Orchestra Now, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director; and others
Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49)
Souvenir de Paganini (1828)
Fantaisie-Impromptu in C-sharp minor, Op. 66 (1834)
Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840)
La Campanella (1826)
Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785-1849)
Concerto in D minor, Op. 61 (1823)
Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)
From Maria Stuarda (1835)
Adolphe Adam (1803-56)
Bravura Variations on Mozart’s Ah! Vous dirai-je maman (n.d.)
Franz Liszt (1811-86)
From 6 Chants Polonais, S. 480 (1857-60)
Consolation No. 3 in D-flat, S.172 (1849-50)
Gnomenreigen, S. 145 (1862)
Robert Schumann (1810-56)
Violin Sonata No. 1 in A minor, Op. 105 (1851)
Tickets: $25–$60

WEEKEND TWO: Originality and Influence
Thursday, August 17
SPECIAL EVENT
Movement, Miniatures, and Mysticism
Spiegeltent
8 pm Performance: Bard Music West
Trace the influence of Chopin’s work in the music of Les Six to Witold Lutosławski (1913-94); Henryk Górecki (1933-2010); Marta Ptaszyńska (b. 1943); Agata Zubel (b. 1978); and others
Tickets: $15-40

Friday, August 18
SPECIAL EVENT
The Romantic Wind Symphony
Sosnoff Theater
5 pm Performance: New York Wind Symphony
Charles Gounod (1818-93)
   Petite Symphonie for Winds, Op. 216 (1885)
Hector Berlioz (1803–69)
   Grande Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, Op. 15 (1840)
Tickets: $25-40

PROGRAM SEVEN
Chopin and the Piano
Sosnoff Theater
7:30 pm Preconcert Talk: Jonathan Bellman
8 pm Performance: Charlie Albright, Michael Brown, Danny Driver, Piers Lane, Anna Polonsky, and others, piano
Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49)
Selections from Etudes, Op. 10 (1830) and 25 (1836)
Nocturne, Op. 27, No. 2 (1836)
Sonata in B-flat minor, Op. 35 (1839)
Polonaise in A-flat, Op. 53 (1842)
Scherzo in E, Op. 54 (1842)
Barcarolle in F-sharp, Op. 60 (1845-46)
and other works
Tickets: $25–$60

Saturday, August 19
PANEL TWO
Chopin’s Place in 19th-Century Performance Culture
Olin Hall
10 am–noon
Free and open to the public

PROGRAM EIGHT
Chopin and the Salon
Olin Hall
1 pm Preconcert Talk: Byron Adams
1:30 pm Performance: Monika Krajewska, mezzo-soprano; Michael Brown and Anna Polonsky, piano; Nicholas Canellakis, cello; Bard Festival Chamber Players; members of The Orchestra Now
Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49)
Introduction and Polonaise brillante in C, Op. 3 (1829-30)
Waltzes Op. 34, No. 3 (1838) and Op. 70, No. 1 (1835)
John Field (1782-1837)
Nocturne No. 12 in G, H.58D (1822)
Ferdinand Ries (1784-1838)
Concerto No. 3 in C-sharp minor, Op. 55 (1812)
Louis Spohr (1784-1859)
Octet in E , Op. 32 (1814)
Maria Szymanowska (1789–1831)
Songs and Mazurka No. 8 in D (n.d.)
Auguste Franchomme (1808–84)
Nocturne, for two cellos, in E minor, Op. 14, No. 1 (1837)
Clara Wieck (1819–96)
Soirées Musicales, Op. 6, No. 3 (1836)
Pauline Viardot (1821-1910)
From 6 Mazurkas de Chopin (1848)
Tickets: $40

PROGRAM NINE*
The Polish National Opera: Halka
Sosnoff Theater
7 pm Preconcert Talk: Halina Goldberg
8 pm Performance*: Amanda Majeski, soprano; Teresa Buchholz, mezzo-soprano; Miles Mykkanen, tenor; Aubrey Allicock, baritone; Liam Moran, bass-baritone; Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director; American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director; and others; directed by Mary Birnbaum; scenic design by Grace Laubacher; lighting design by Anshuman Bhatia
Stanislaw Moniuszko (1819–72)
Halka (1858)
Tickets: $25–$75

Sunday, August 20
PROGRAM TEN
From the Sacred to the Revolutionary: Choral Works from Poland and France
Olin Hall
10 am Performance: Bard Music Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director
Works by Bartłomiej Pękiel (d. 1670); Marcin Mielczewski (1600-51); Grzegorz Gerwazy Gorczycki (c. 1665−1734); Luigi Cherubini (1760–1842); Józef Elsner (1769−1854); François-Adrien Boieldieu (1775−1834); Daniel François Esprit Auber (1782–1871); Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864); Fromental Halévy (1799−1862); Louis Lefébure-Wély (1817−69); and others
Tickets: $40

PROGRAM ELEVEN
Chopin’s Influence
Olin Hall
1 pm Preconcert Talk: Richard Wilson
1:30 pm Performance: Monika Krajewska, mezzo-soprano; Michael Brown, Simon Ghraichy, Piers Lane, piano; Nicholas Canellakis, cello; and others
Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49)
Sonata for Cello and Piano, Op. 65 (1846)
Robert Schumann (1810–56)
“Chopin,” from Carnaval, Op. 9 (1834–35)
Johannes Brahms (1833–97)
Intermezzo, Op. 118, No. 2 (1893)
Edvard Grieg (1843–1907)
Nocturne, Op. 54, No. 4 (c. 1891)
Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924)
Impromptu, Op. 25, No. 1 (1880)
Ignacy Paderewski (1860–1941)
Melodie, Op. 8, No. 3 (1882)
Claude Debussy (1862–1918)
Étude No. 12, Pour les accordes (1915)
Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915)
From 24 Preludes, Op. 11 (1888-96)
Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937)
From Mazurkas, Op. 50 (1924-25)
Works by Henryk Wieniawski (1835–80); Moritz Moszkowski (1854–1925); and Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
Tickets: $40

PROGRAM TWELVE*
Shared Passions, Different Paths
Sosnoff Theater
3:30 pm Preconcert Talk
4:30 pm Performance*: Tamara Mumford, mezzo-soprano; Danny Driver, piano; Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director; The Orchestra Now, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director; and others
Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49)
Andante spianato and Grande Polonaise, Op. 22 (1830−35)
Hector Berlioz (1803–69)
   Roméo et Juliette, symphonie dramatique, Op. 17 (1839)
Tickets: $25–$75

Bard SummerScape ticket information
Tickets for all Bard SummerScape events are now on sale. For tickets and further information on all SummerScape events, call the Fisher Center box office at 845-758-7900 or visit fishercenter.bard.edu/summerscape.

Venues:
SummerScape opera, theater, and dance performances and most Bard Music Festival programs are held in the Sosnoff Theater or LUMA Theater in Bard’s Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and celebrated since its opening as a major architectural landmark in the region. Some chamber programs and other BMF events are in Olin Hall, and the Spiegeltent has its own schedule of events, in addition to serving as a restaurant, café, and bar before and after performances. Film Series screenings are at the Jim Ottaway Jr. Film Center in the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Center.

New York City Round-Trip Coach Transportation:
To make a reservation on the round-trip SummerScape coach provided exclusively to ticket holders for specific performances indicated by * in the listings above, call the box office at 845-758-7900 or select this option when purchasing tickets. The round-trip fare is $40 and reservations are required. The coach departs from behind Lincoln Center, on Amsterdam Avenue between 64th and 65th Streets. Find additional details at: fishercenter.bard.edu/transportation.

Full Schedule:
For a complete schedule of SummerScape and Bard Music Festival events (subject to change), follow the links given below. Updates are posted at the festival web site fishercenter.bard.edu/summerscape.

Fisher Center members receive priority access to the best seats in advance, and those who join the Center’s email list receive advance booking opportunities as well as regular news and updates.

Bard SummerScape: fishercenter.bard.edu/summerscape

Bard Music Festival: fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf

Tickets and Subscriptions: fishercenter.bard.edu/tickets; or by phone at 845-758-7900. Tickets to all mainstage events start at $25.

Special offers:

Create Your Own Series: save 25% and enjoy maximum flexibility, by choosing four or more events.
SummerScape Mainstage Series: save 30% and guarantee seats for dance, theater, and opera events.
Groups of 10 or more receive a 20% discount.

Updates: Bard’s “e-subscribers” get all the news in regular updates. Click here to sign up, or send an e-mail to [email protected].

All programs are subject to change.

The 2017 SummerScape season is made possible in part through the generous support of Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, the Board of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, the Board of the Bard Music Festival, and Fisher Center members, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

 

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© 21C Media Group, April 2017