Once again, Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra present an obscure operatic masterpiece as the featured component of the Chopin-centered 2017 Bard Summerscape Music Festival, Chopin and His World.

Dmitrij, Antonin Dvořák’s masterpiece about patriotic fervor, love, betrayal and murder is a long-neglected major work and his only, so-called “grand opera.” Dimitrij, which features magnificent choruses and lavish settings encased in a sweeping and momentous historical plot, has never before been fully-staged in the United States.

Chopin, perhaps best known for the innovative style of his miraculous piano works, such as the mazurkas and impromptus, uses a short character piece with a general feeling of spontaneity. Overall, impromptus may be categorized into several different groups: some appear as part of a larger cycle, such as Dvořák’s G minor Impromptu from his Piano Pieces. But how does Dvořák’s grand opera with an American staging premiere echo the spirit of Chopin?

The great achievement of Dvořák, who began his career as a violist in an orchestra conducted by Smetana, was to join the warmth, gaiety and optimism of native Czech music to the great classical forms developed by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. This is what places the great Bohemian composer in the Romantic, nationalist tradition of Chopin.

After Bedřich Smetana, Dvořák was the second Czech composer to achieve worldwide recognition. Following Smetana’s nationalist example, he frequently employed aspects, specifically rhythms, of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia. Dvořák’s own style has been described as ‘the fullest recreation of a national idiom with that of the symphonic tradition, absorbing folk influences and finding effective ways of using them’.

In 1878, Dvořák’s international reputation was launched upon the favorable reviews of respected music critics of the day, for his works, known as Slavonic Dances, published by Simroc with the recommendation of Johannes Brahams. Brahms had been on the panel of judges that awarded Dvořák first place in 1874, 1876 and 1877 in the Austrian State Prize for Composition.

Dimitrij (1882) is rarely staged outside the Czech Republic, and only received its U.S. concert première in 1984, more than a century after its composition. Yet the opera was a popular success at its Prague première and has long been recognized as an exemplar of Dvořák’s signature lyricism and masterfully stirring choral writing.

By contrast, another of the composer’s twelve operas, Dvořák’s fairytale, Rusalka, is still performed in the regular rotation of the major opera repertories.

Marking the long overdue first fully staged American production of Dvořák’s opera, Bard’s historic presentation also features Dimitrij’s rarely heard, full-length overture and original, brutal conclusion. Conceived expressly for SummerScape 2017, the opera’s new manifestation is produced by Anne Bogart, who co-founded the acclaimed SITI Company to redefine and revitalize contemporary American theater. A 1974 Bard alumna whose many honors include two “Best Director” Obies and the Jesse L. Rosenberger Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Creative & Performing Arts, it was Bogart who collaborated with Bill T. Jones on A Rite, the major new dance-theater piece Bard co-commissioned to commemorate SummerScape 2013’s centenary of The Rite of Spring.

Explaining her vision for the setting of the upcoming production, Bogart said:

“For me it was important to set Dimitrij at a time analogous to the “Time of Troubles” in Russia, when the world order had altered and no one knew whether to support or resist the new hegemony. Of course I could have set our production in the present but instead I opted for the slight distancing of a time reminiscent of 1989 Berlin. Our Dimitrij takes place at the moment in history when Communism had collapsed but it was not yet clear what shape the future might take.”

To help realize Bogart’s vision, Bard’s production features sets by Tony and Obie Award-winner David Zinn; costumes by Tony nominee and Outer Critics Circle Award-winner Constance Hoffman; lighting by Henry Hewes Design Award-winner Brian H. Scott; movement direction by Barney O’Hanlon, whose three decades of Bogart collaborations include SummerScape 2013’s A Rite; and hair and makeup by Jared Janas and David Bova, whose work graced last year’s mainstage presentation of Iris.

Headlining Bard’s original production is tenor Clay Hilley, winner of the New York Wagner Society’s Robert Lauch Award. After his recent title role appearance in Idomeneo, Germany’s Main-Post marveled:

“Hilley commands the stage with his physical presence. His powerful tenor combines force and clarity – nobody would ever call into question the leadership of this bear of a man.”

Soprano Melissa Citro makes her festival debut as Dimitrij’s Polish wife, Marina, having already demonstrated her abilities with Dvořák’s music in the title role of Rusalka, in which, as Opera News reports:

“Citro gave unstintingly of a bright and beautiful voice, singing with the utmost security and power. Her portrayal of the unhappy heroine was fully nuanced, demonstrating a complete understanding of this complex character.”

Completing their fatal love triangle as Godunov’s daughter, Xenie, is Russian soprano Olga Tolkmit. A nominee for Russia’s Golden Mask Award, in her American debut as Elektra in SummerScape 2013’s Oresteia she impressed the Financial Times with her “resonant, bright-voiced soprano.” Nora Sourouzian – “a velvet-voiced mezzo-soprano from Canada with an arresting stage personality” (The Telegraph, UK) – returns to the festival as Marfa, widow of Ivan the Terrible. Like her, Levi Hernandez starred in Bard’s La Navarraise last season on a double-bill with Puccini’s Le Villi. Blessed with an “impressive knack for subtle text-painting within a pristinely negotiated coloratura line” (Opera News), he sings the role of Prince Shuisky, leader of the Godunov faction and eventual murderer of Dimitrij, while Joseph Barron lends his “rolling, imposing baritone” (Opera Today) to that of General Basmanov, who leads the doomed pretender’s supporters. Peixin Chen, bass, makes his SummerScape debut in the role of Jove, or the patriarch, having most recently performed in productions of Aida and Salome at the Metropolitan Opera. Rounding out Bard’s cast as Neborsky and Bucinsky respectively are bass-baritone Joseph Damon Chappel, a founding member of the Grammy-nominated Tiffany Consort, as seen in previous SummerScape productions of Die Liebe der Danae and Le roi malgré lui; and baritone Thomas McCargar, a member of the Grammy Award-winning Choir of Trinity Wall Street who has collaborated with artists ranging from contemporary composers Du Yun and Missy Mazzoli to Andrea Bocelli, Kanye West, and the Rolling Stones.

Dimitrij runs for five performances between July 28 and August 6, with an Opera Talk, free and open to the public, before the matinee on July 30. Bard Music Festival 2017 also offers an all-too-rare opportunity to see Stanisław Moniuszko’s Halka, Poland’s first great opera, in a semi-staged performance at the Bard Music Festival (August 19).

For a selection of Videos relating to the opera click HERE

Stanisław Moniuszko’s Halka (1858), Bard Music Festival, Program 9

Although several of Chopin’s contemporaries explicitly expressed the hope that he would be the one to write Poland’s first great opera, that distinction fell instead to his compatriot Stanisław Moniuszko (1819–72). On August 19, Bard presents an all-too-rare semi-staged performance of Halka (1858), the four-act masterwork with which Moniuszko ensured his legacy as the father of Polish opera. Set to a politically charged libretto by Włodzimierz Wolski, a poet with radical social views, Halka is the story of the eponymous young peasant woman whose arrival disrupts an engagement party between wealthy landowners Janusz and Zofia. It soon transpires that Halka is not only in love with Janusz, but believes herself engaged to him, and is pregnant with his child. When she loses the baby and learns that Janusz intends to go ahead with the wedding, Halka is broken-hearted, and, after fantasizing about revenge, takes her own life instead. Regularly performed in Poland, Halka remains virtually unknown abroad, despite being “redolent with the melodic flavors of Polish folk music and balladry” (New York Times), and hailed as “melodious, affecting and appealing: … a rare treat” (Washington Post).

Bard’s semi-staged production stars Amanda Majeski in the title role. A Polish-American soprano whose honors include first prize at the Palm Beach Opera Vocal Competition, Majeski recently gave “a commanding performance” (Opera News) at Washington National Opera that proved “a great showcase for her rich, resonant soprano” (Financial Times). Singing opposite her as the faithless Janusz is Aubrey Allicock, who graced Bard’s “TurandotProject” last summer, and whose “bass-baritone has a distinctively glossy, warm color, with increasingly impressive freedom and fullness at the top of its range” (Opera News). Returning to the festival after her “consistently excellent” (New York Arts) appearances in previous seasons, mezzo-soprano Teresa Buchholz – winner of the female division at Carnegie Hall’s Nico Castel International Master Singer Competition – sings the role of Janusz’s kind-hearted young bride, Zofia. Liam Moran, a “sturdy bass who sings with affecting gravity” (New York Times), undertakes that of her father, Stolnik, and Miles Mykkanen, a 2016 Sullivan Foundation award recipient who impressed Opera News with his tenor’s “sheer vocal gold,” sings the part of Jontek, an old friend of Halka’s whose love for her remains unrequited.

Returning to helm Bard’s semi-staged production are director Mary Birnbaum, scenic designer Grace Laubacher, and lighting designer Anshuman Bhatia, the creative team behind last year’s double-bill of Le Villi and La Navarraise. “A director of real quality” (Houston Press), Birnbaum is an International Opera Awards finalist whose work has been variously described as “unsettlingly immediate” (New York Times) and “a dazzling display of inventiveness and … delight” (San Francisco Chronicle).

For a full schedule of SummerScape and Bard Music Festival events follow the links below.
Bard SummerScape: fishercenter​.bard​.edu/​s​u​m​m​e​r​s​c​ape
Bard Music Festival: fishercenter​.bard​.edu/​bmf
Tickets and Subscriptions: fishercenter​.bard​.edu/​t​i​c​k​ets; or by phone at 845 – 758-​​7900. Tickets to all mainstage events start at $25.
Information on transportation options from Manhattan can be found here: http://fishercenter.bard.edu/visit/transportation/

The heart of SummerScape 2016 is the 27th annual Bard Music Festival, Puccini and His World.

Giacomo Puccini — Photo copywrite by Frank C. Bangs — Library of Congress

Puccini is widely regarded as the world’s most popular opera composers, primarily for La Boheme, Madama Butterfly, and Tosca. Yet, the very features of these operas that have done so much to ensure Puccini’s mass appeal, have also given rise to a criticism. His critics assert that his sensual lyricism, masterly orchestral colors and soaring climaxes signify a bourgeois sentimentality without the depth of Verdi or Wagner. Puccini is accused of being, in a word, “commercial.”

During the premiere of a 1991 revival of Puccini’s opera La Fanciulla del West, this writer overheard one standee in the Metropolitan Opera Family Circle standing room section whisper to another standee, “Puccini’s music sounds better than it is, and Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.”

The criticisms of commercialism spread alongside Puccini’s popularity after his death, leading conductor Vittorio Gui to remark, in exaggeration, that Puccini was the most beloved and the most despised of all composers.

Puccini’s great success was, by some, ascribed to declining standards of taste in the 20th century. Now, however, Bard SummerScape 2016 offers the world an opportunity for reexamination of the Puccini paradox during the Festival’s final two weekends. August 5–7 explores “Puccini and Italian Musical Culture.” Then, August 12–14 looks “ Beyond Verismo.”

Through the prism of Puccini’s life and career, the Bard Music Festival explores more than a century of Italian politics, arts, letters and music. Eleven concert programs over these two weekends are organized around such themes as the role of politics in Italian opera, attempts to synthesize Italian and German musical styles, Italy’s choral tradition, and the rise of Futurism, Modernism, and the avant-garde.

The Festival features a broad array of other Italian composers as well. Alfredo Catalini and Arrigo Boito are two of Puccini’s immediate predecessors; Amilcare Ponchielli as Puccini’s primary teacher; and among his rival opera composers, the Festival presents works by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Pietro Mascagni and Ferruccio Busoni. Additionally, the Festival features many composers known for instrumental works. There are also works by Gian Carlo Menotti and Luciano Berio, influential 20th century composers whose works echo some of Puccini’s prominent musical ideas. Bard will revive Jules Massenet’s short two-act opera, “La Navarraise” and pair it with Puccini’s first opera, Le Villi (1884).

Before the Bard Music Festival in August, SummerScape 2016 opens on July 1–3 with three performances and the world premiere of John Heginbotham and Amy Trompetter’s “Fantasque.” “Fantasque” evolved from Ottornio Respighi’s La Boutique Fantastique, a ballet score adapted from a suite of Rossini’s piano works. Sergei Diaghiliev’s Ballets Rousses mounted the first production of the ballet in 1919.

Now Heginbotham and Trompetter are creating an entirely new work to Respighi and Rossini’s music. Giant puppets and human dancers join forces to create a fable of a battle between light and darkness, with a fantastical cast of characters featuring giant babies, blue angels, devils, rats and a restaurant where the customers are tuxedo-wearing fish.

July 7–17 at SummerScape brings to life nine performances of “Demolishing Everything With Amazing Speed,” a collection of four previously unpublished, untranslated and unperformed of Fortunato Depero’s futurist puppet plays. They are here gathered for a unified performance, produced by Dan Harlin, staged at the LUMA Theater.

In a ground-breaking discovery in 2015, Hudson Valley-based puppet artist Dan Hurlin unearthed four more of Depero’s puppet plays, written during WWI. Full of surreal imagery but empty of dialogue, the plays represent a marriage of playful whimsy with violence and menace. The nine performances in July will all be at the LUMA Theater, and are suitable for ages twelve and up.

From July 21-August 14, SummerScape launches into the medium of film in a series entitled, “Puccini and the Operatic Impulse in Cinema.”

Since the dawn of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century, Opera has been an enduring reference point for filmmakers.  This was, coincidentally, the time of Puccini’s artistic ascendancy.

Through Senso (1954), Rocco and His Brothers (1960), and The Leopard (1963), SummerScape will focus special attention on the cinematic legacy of Luchino Visconti, who was also a noted director of Italian opera.  In his career as an opera director Visconti collaborated with such greats as Maria Callas and Leonard Bernstein.

The other film offerings in the series span an exciting range of times and talents with The Toll of the Sea (1922), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), A Room With A View (1988), The Age of Innocence (1993), The Last Emperor (1987), and The Immigrant (2013).  The Immigrant stars Metropolitan Opera star tenor, Joseph Calleia in the role of Enrico Caruso.

The “operatic impulse” comes to full fruition at this year’s SummerScape with Iris (1898), Pietro Mascagni’s late opera.  Iris is rarely staged, unlike his perennially popular, Cavalleria Rusticana. Bard SummerScape is offering five performances of the bewitchingly lovely, opera, with its “dreamlike score,” (the Independent, UK)  from July 22–31.

Talise Trevigne as Isis– Photo by Todd Norwood

Iris is a product of the japonisme movement sweeping Europe before the turn of the 19th century.  Like Madama Butterfly, Iris depicts a tragedy of innocence betrayed in late 19ty century Japan.  Iris is a young girl, tricked into leaving her blind father for a brothel in Tokyo. She commits suicide after her father discovers and then denounces her.

The cast is headlined by Grammy-nominated Talise Trevigne, recently acclaimed for her portrayal of Butterfly at North Carolina Opera. Bass-baritone Douglas Williams, and Austrian-Australian tenor Gerard Schneider.

James Darrah — Photo by Simon Kessler

Director James Darrah heads up this production—conceived expressly for SummerScape 2016.  He’s a staunch advocate of multidisciplinary collaboration, and Iris features costumes by his longtime professional partner Peabody Southwell, as well as evocative projections by Adam Larsen, lighting by Neil Peter Jampolis, and set designs from Emily MacDonald and Cameron Jaye Moc. Leon Botstein leads the American Symphony Orchestra for the five performance run of Iris, between July 22 and 31.  There will be an Opera Talk with Maestro Botstein, free and open to the public, before the July 24th matinee.

Finally, the SummerScape 2016 Festival is rounded out with the Spiegeltent, back for an eleventh magnificent summer.  Back by popular demand for a third season, Tony Award-nominee Mx. Justin Vivian Bond, “the greatest cabaret artist of this generation” (New Yorker), returns to resume duties as host, emcee, and guest curator.  Friday and Saturday evenings feature world-class performers, musicians and DJs. Thursdays bring a lineup of one-of-a-kind jazz concerts presented in collaboration with Catskill jazz Factory.

The Bard SummerScape Spiegeltent is a handmade pavilion from Belgium, decorated with mirrors and stained glass, evoking a bygone era of glamour and richesse.  The mirrored tent provides a sumptuous and magical environment to enjoy cutting-edge cabaret and world-class musical performances—almost all of which have sold out in recent years—capped by dining and late-night dancing throughout the festival.  Dining is inspired by seasonal Hudson Valley ingredients and served at lunchtime on Saturdays and Sundays, and suppertime on Thursdays through Saturday, with a full bar offering to complement the menu.  As Edinburgh Fringe magazine suggests, “Enter the Spiegeltent—the tent of dreams— and you will never be the same again.”

For a full schedule and much more on the Spiegeltent click HERE.

For tickets, directions and further information:
Call the Fisher Center box office at 845–758-7900
Or visit the website HERE.

Featured Image:
The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
Photo by Peter Aaron ’68/Esto
 

Mascagni’s three-act opera, Iris, debuted on November 22, 1898 at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. Luigi Illica (Madama Butterfly, Tosca) originally created the libretto under a contract with composer Alberto Franchetti in 1894. The story goes that Franchetti changed his mind about the project, and abandoned it. Three years later Illica offered the book to Mascagni who agreed to take on the project of composing the score.

Iris is a young girl, violently abducted from the home she shares with her blind father. She is forced into prostitution in Yoshiwara, Tokyo’s red light district.  Yoshiwara had been constructed to contain the sex trade to a small, enclosed area of Tokyo. It persisted as such, even under the American occupation, until the 1950s, when prostitution became illegal, after pressure from the commanders of the American armies.

Yoshiwara prostitutes c. 1890

Because of her resistance, Osaka, Iris’s abductor, tires of his efforts to consummate his passion with her. He hands her over to the crude brothel keeper Kyoto, who humiliates Iris by having her paraded in a transparent gown.  It is then that she is discovered and denounced by her father. Iris throws herself into a sewer, where her suffering is prolonged, before she finally dies.

Talise Trevigne as Iris — photo by Cory Weaver

Grammy-nominated soprano Talise Trevigne, who recently proved herself “a Butterfly worthy of mention alongside of Maria Callas” (Voix des Artes), sings the title role. Bass-Baritone Douglas Williams –”the most completely satisfying singer” (New York Times) — portrays the villainous brothel-keeper, Kyoto. Austrian-Australian tenor Gerard Schneider sings Osaka, the rich young man whose lust and treachery spell Iris’s downfall. Matt Boehler plays Il Cieco, Iris’s father. The New York Times refers to Boehler as “a bass with an attitude and the goods to back it up.”

Pietro Miscagni — Photo courtesy BBC archives

Mascagni (1863–1945) was Giacomo Puccini’s close friend, one-time roommate, and sometime rival for public acclaim. Puccini is the subject of this year’s Bard Music Festival, “Puccini and His World”. Mascagni is best known, of course, for his one-act masterpiece, Cavalleria Rusticana, which sets the standard in verismo opera to this day. According to music critic John Palmer (allmusic.com), the success of Cavalleria weighed upon Mascagni in that he wanted to be remembered as a more versatile composer, one reputed as capable of greater breadth in style of composition than solely for his most popular work.

In Iris Mascagni sought a means “to expand his orchestral palette and make the most of the exotic imagery afforded by Illica’s libretto” (Palmer). In June 1896 Mascagni commenced work on the score. Proceeding slowly and with great deliberation, he wrote of the project to a friend, that he endeavored to create “real music, not … some buffoonery of oddities and scenes over a contrabassoon or bass pedal” (Palmer).

Iris premiered to acclamation in Rome in 1898, then two months later opened in a slightly revised version at La Scala in Milan.  By 1902 Iris had been staged throughout the capitals of Europe and North and South America.  Mascagni himself conducted the New York premiere.

James Darrah — Director– Photo by Simon Kessler

Conceived expressly for SummerScape 2016, James Darrah’s staged production of Iris represents an all too rare opportunity to realize the opera’s many interesting dramatic points. Mascagni crafted a shimmering, dreamlike score called, “bewitchingly lovely” (Independent, UK). Director James Darrah calls Iris “severe, dark, violent and truly expressionistic in tone and rich with imagination.” Darrah goes on to say, “An evocatively abstract libretto pairs with staggering orchestral writing, imbuing the piece with an otherworldly scope.”

Iris precedes Madama Butterfly by six years, and Mascagni’s use of exotic percussion — such as chimes and gongs — foreshadows elements of Puccini’s orchestration for Madama Butterfly. There is a twenty second passage of orchestration in Turandot that Puccini seems to have lifted in its entirety from the second act of Iris. The overture or prologue of Iris displays an assortment of musical impressions anticipating Madama Butterfly, but is most strikingly reminiscent of some of Wagner’s gradually rising string passages, which Mascagni magnificently culminates into the Inno del sole (Hymn to the Sun).

“Throughout the opera, Mascagni creates an exotic atmosphere his contemporaries would have associated with Japan. A harp conveys the delicate sound of the samisen Iris plays in Act II,” while japonisme modal passages in the strings (Palmer) are conjured during the puppet show in Act I. Audiences will enjoy identifying suggestions of other famous compositions by the likes of Puccini, Wagner and Debussy, delicately woven into the texture of Iris.

These performances feature the American Symphony Orchestra under the baton of music director Leon Botstein. As Time Out New York observed last season, “Botstein and Bard SummerScape show courage, foresight and great imagination, honoring operas that larger institutions are content to ignore.” Indeed, as the Financial Times notes, “Some of the most important summer opera experiences in the U.S. are not at the better known festivals but at Bard SummerScape.”

There will be five performances of Iris at SummerScape 2016, in the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. Friday evening performances at 7:30 PM will be on July 22nd and 29th.  There are three matinees scheduled for July 24th, 27th and 31st at 2 PM.

Tickets start at $25, and can be purchased now at the Fisher Center box office 845–758-7900 or website here:

Featured Image: Talise Trevigne, soprano, as Iris — Bard SummerScape 2016 — Photo by Corey Weaver

The Bard Music Festival has a history which places it at the top of summer offerings (“the summer’s most stimulating music festival” (Los Angeles Times)). Carlos Chavez and His World, the centerpiece of the Bard Music Festival program for SummerScape 2015, promises to conjure a richness of sound, motion and ideas on this subject matter with a focus and breadth heretofore never experienced in the U.S. This is the first Bard summer festival dedicated to a Latin American composer.

American Symphony orchestra music director and conductor Leon Botstein promises–through the style of thematic programming he has pioneered—to produce a fascinating and incomparable musical and cultural experience. Carlos Chavez and His World will roll out over two weekends in eleven separate concert programs from August 7–16, 2015.

Each program is themed to portray a different salient aspect of the life, work and milieu of Chavez (1899–1978), who is the central figure in 20th century Mexican music. The concerts are complemented by pre-concert lectures, panel discussions, special events and expert commentary. The eleven event musical menu is enriched by performances of some compositions from Chavez’s predecessors and contemporaries, and the supplementary programs address questions of Mexico’s musical identity both in terms of the traditional-regional and the modern-global contexts.

The venue for the festival is Bard’s Hudson River campus, mainly the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

Drawing on recent scholarship, the Festival’s signature programming, multi-disciplinary thematic approach, and emphasis on context and reception history make for a depth and breadth of cultural discovery that appeals to classical music novices and aficionados alike.

Carlos Chavez was a unique, internationally renowned composer who embodied 20th century Mexican culture. Chavez was a protagonist of the indigenismo movement, employing modernist composition and performance techniques in his music, while referencing Mexico’s indigenous past. His music is thoroughly inspired by Mexican themes from which he is able to synthesize markers of Mexican identity with twentieth century modernism. His friend Aaron Copland once described his work as, “authentic music of the New World.”

As a conductor, Chavez likewise experienced broad recognition for his accomplishments. He founded the Orquesta Sinfonica de Mexico, the country’s national symphony orchestra. Over his career, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, he traveled often to the U.S. where he guest conducted the major symphony orchestras: Boston, Cleveland, New York, LA, and Philadelphia. In addition, his travels with the baton to Europe and South America gained international visibility for Mexican musical and cultural life.

Carlos Chavez — 1930–40 — Photo by Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Chavez was also known as a writer, music theorist and academic. After the Mexican revolution he founded El Istituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, the overarching cultural institution of Mexico’s dance, music and visual arts. Yet, somehow, his representation in the classical repertory has been very limited, and his presence in the constellation of music and cultural icons has been reduced. Until now.

Carlos Chavez and His World will go a long way to redressing the imbalance of quality and unrecognized work from this composer. Bard seeks to survey, too, this Mexican and Latin American cultural period via Chavez’s life lens. Born in 1899, Chavez lived through the Mexican Revolution 1910–1917 (which wasn’t fully settled until 1930). Following the Revolution, there was a great cultural renaissance in Mexico, out of which sprang the artistic material for reassessment of Mexican culture in Carlos Chavez and His World.

Bard’s Festival

Leon Botstein on Carlos Chávez and Latin American Music from The Fisher Center on Vimeo.

The Festival opens on Friday, August 7 with Program One: Chavez and Mexico’s Musical Heritage. The program features an assortment of chamber, vocal, and small orchestral arrangements by Chavez and two contemporaries: Ponce and Revueltas. Also included are songs and other works by eight other composers, presenting a survey of Mexican styles and traditions through themes of Latin America v. U.S. music, culture and life; Europeans in Mexico; the music of Spain; and Mexican musical tradition, including the choral traditional heritage.

Program Two on Saturday August 8th, The Parisian Influence, reflects Chavez’s pilgrimage to Paris in the early 1920s and his experience of the emergence of modern music through his association with Edgar Varese. The performances are preceded by a morning panel discussion on Culture and National Identity: The Case of Mexico. After a pre-concert talk by Byron Adams, the program will offer chamber and vocal arrangements by Chavez, Dukas, Ravel, Rolon, Ponce, Milhaud, Poulenc and Stravinsky.

Program Three at 7 P.M. on August 8th, Music and Politics of Mexico: The Crossroad of Antifascism is preceded by a half-hour talk by Sergio Vela. We hear the first orchestral concerts in the series, beginning with Chavez’s Sinfonia de Antigona, developed from incidental music Chavez composed for Jean Cocteau’s modern version of Sophocles’ s Antigone. The program includes symphonic works by Chavez and Honegger, and scores for film and theater by Revueltas, and Nancarrow. The film, “Redes,” is an important example of Mexican film’s golden age.

Panel Two, Mexico and the United States, Past, Present and Future on Sunday August 9, 10 A.M. – Noon, precedes Program Four: Music and the Ten Year Mexican Revolution. The period following the 10-year civil war was an artistic renaissance that saw the creation of explicitly national works addressing the indigenous, mestizo, and/or modern aspects of Mexican culture, including these songs and works for guitar or piano by Chavez, Revueltas, Galindo and Mancayo, and others. There’s a half-hour pre-concert talk by Ricardo Miranda.

Sunday, August 9th’s spectacular continues at 5:00 P.M. with a pre-concert talk by Roberto Kolb Neuhaus introducing Program Five: Music, Murals, and Puppets. The world-renowned Mexican muralist movement, spearheaded by Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, was born of the burgeoning nationalism of the post-revolutionary era. Murals bearing social and political messages were created in an attempt to reunify the country under the post-revolutionary government. In the musical selections for this concluding section of the Festival’s first weekend, Bard presents works that capture the murals’ riotous color, bold strokes, neoprimitivism, and larger than-life aesthetic.

At 5:30 the music program opens with Chavez’s Suite for Double Quartet, from The Daughter of Colchis (Dark Meadow), a ballet commissioned for Martha Graham, of which the New York Times declared, “It’s about sex.” Following is Manuel de Falla’s El Retablo de Maese Pedro, a “puppet chamber opera” based on a scene from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in which, it is said, de Falla began the transition into the Hispanic neo-classicism of his later works. The program concludes with Troka, a wind symphony Revueltas originally composed to accompany a children’s radio broadcast advocating the use of technology and the downfall of imperialism.

An exhilarating assortment of works by contemporary composers inspired partly by Carlos Chavez, the Special Event, Music by Contemporary Latin American Composers, will be held at the LUMA Theater at 7:30 P.M. on Thursday, August 13. These composers are young and innovative. Their works share some of the ethos of Chavez’s imaginary nativism or indigenismo. Several of them have studied in and are now living in the New York City area, and like Chavez, compose music borne of very traditional as well as ultra-modern influences.

The final weekend of the Festival, August 14–16, kicks off with La Otra Conquista, a film by Salvador Carrasco, showing at 3:00 P.M. at the Ottaway Film Center. At 5:00 P.M. the Orquesta Mexicana will perform works by Carlos Chavez and others at Olin Hall. Program Six of the Festival, East and West, opens with a Pre-concert Talk by Kyle Gann at 7:30 P.M. at the Sosnoff Theater. Then, at 8:00 P.M. begins the comprehensive exploration of works revealing the cross-cultural Eastern-Western influences. This program’s emphasis on percussion is expressed in works by Chavez, John Cage and others.

There is a discussion about Mexico and Latin America in Panel Three at 10 A.M. on Saturday, August 15, followed by Program Seven, New York, New York at 1:00 P.M. at Olin Hall. The Pre-concert Talk by Christopher H. Gibbs is to elucidate the connections Chavez made during his extensive visits to New York among a variety of composers such as Varese, Cowell, Copland, and Virgil Thomson, and also the influence of Harlem Renaissance Afro-American dance music upon the pieces Chavez composed while living in the City.

Reimagined Landscapes and Pasts, Program Eight, opens at 7:00 P.M. on the 15th with a Pre-concert Talk by Leonora Saavedra. James Bagwell conducts the Bard Festival Chorale and Leon Botstein conducts the American Symphony Orchestra in a mostly orchestral program opening with Sinfonia India, Chavez’s best-known work. It’s followed by works by Villa-Lobos, Revueltas, and Moncayo.

Program Nine, at 10 A.M. on Sunday, August 16, Sacred and Secular Choral Music from 5 Centuries, is a performance with commentary. The performance is by the Bard Festival Chorale conducted by James Bagwell.

Chavez composed a number of works for chamber ensembles in the late 1950s when he was engaged in teaching at different distinguished U.S. educational institutions, such as Harvard and University of Buffalo. Post WW II Latin America, Program Ten, pairs some of Chavez’s works with works of his contemporaries. Richard Wilson gives a Pre-concert talk from 1:00 – 1:30 P.M.

Program Eleven, Musical Culture of the Hemisphere concludes the 2015 Festival with some of Latin America’s most important contributions to orchestral literature. Chavez’s ballet symphony, Horse Power, written to symbolize the economic relationship between the industrial United States and the agricultural tropics, is a vital score, rich in orchestral color, which achieves a synthesis between the influence of Stravinsky and popular Mexican dance idioms.

This year’s offerings are certain to deliver the customary giant serving of cultural wealth and inspiration for which the Bard Musical Festival is known. Maestro Botstein and the faculty at Bard have put together another blockbuster with Carlos Chavez and His World for SummerScape 2015.

Featured image: Photo by Manuel Alvarez Bravo circa 1930–40

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