Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
August 9-18, 2013
by Michael J. Moran
 |
| Fisher Center |
Over two weekends every August since 1990, the Bard Music
Festival has focused on a single composer, along with predecessors, contemporaries,
and successors who influenced or were influenced by that composer. What
distinguishes Bard from other music festivals is the annual publication by
Princeton University Press of an accompanying book with essays contributed by
scholars who also participate as speakers and panelists at festival programs.
The 2013 festival, “Stravinsky and His World,” presented
11concerts, three panel discussions, and two film showings on the Bard College
campus. Most evening concerts featured orchestral music played by members of
the American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Bard President and ASO Music
Director Leon Botstein in the 900-seat Sosnoff Theater of the distinctive
Richard B. Fisher Center designed in 2003 by Frank Gehry. Daytime concerts
offered mainly chamber and instrumental works in the 200-seat Olin Humanities
Building auditorium, where the panels were also held.
While the “Rite of Spring” centennial was duly observed in
Weekend One, a highlight of Weekend Two was a live ASO performance of Hanns Eisler’s
modest score for Resnais’ watershed Holocaust documentary “Night and Fog,”
projected behind the orchestra (in a rare political statement, Stravinsky
defended the Communist Eisler against the U.S. House Un-American Activities
Committee in 1948). The festival climaxed with a double bill of Stravinsky’s
pastoral melodrama “Persephone” and his shattering opera-oratorio “Oedipus
Rex,” both imaginatively semi-staged by Doug Fitch.
To hear these pieces in the context of other work by major
influences (Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov) and contemporaries (Bartok, Varese),
lesser-known colleagues (Tansman, Lourie), and the variety of Stravinsky’s own
invention, from solo piano miniatures (“Madrid”) to serial chamber music (the
Septet) and austere choral music (“Requiem Canticles”) was to appreciate anew
Stravinsky’s protean talent.
Performances by ASO musicians and their guests were
consistently fine. Of special note were mezzo-soprano Jean Stilwell as
Persephone, tenor Gordon Gietz as Oedipus, and pianist Piers Lane, who turned
Antheil’s knuckle-busting “Sonata Sauvage” into a showstopper. James Bagwell
led the Bard Festival Chorale in a stunning choral concert that ranged from a
glowing “Beatus Vir” by Monteverdi to a lovely, if challenging, lamentation by Krenek,
of which Bagwell wryly noted, quoting Ringo Starr, “it don’t come easy.”
With a packed schedule at the festival, time to visit such
nearby attractions as the historic town of Rhinebeck and museums in Hyde Park
celebrating the Roosevelt and Vanderbilt families can be scarce, but the
natural beauty of the Hudson Valley rewards all visitors to the area.
