Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
August 7-16, 2015
by Michael J. Moran
 |
| Fisher Center, Bard College |
Over two weekends every August for the past 26 years, 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 2015 festival, “Carlos Chavez and His World,” presented eleven
concerts, three
panel discussions, and several 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 acoustically excellent 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.
Besides a generous sampling of Chavez, Mexico’s greatest
composer, Weekend Two featured a variety of American and other Latin American
composers who worked with him as a musician and educator. One concert focused
entirely on percussion instruments, where rarely heard works by Lou Harrison, performed
by the Catskill Mountain Gamelan ensemble, and John Cage, played by a group
including several Bard students, were particularly engaging. In a program
celebrating Chavez’s New York connections, soprano Sarah Shafer sang Biblical
settings by Virgil Thomson and lynching blues set by fellow Mexicans Chavez and
Silvestre Revueltas with poignant beauty.
Highlights of a concert showcasing music from post-World War
II Latin America included a knockout performance by Orion Weiss of Ginastera’s
demanding first piano sonata and sensitive accounts of two short Piazzolla
works by an ensemble featuring bandoneon player Raul Jaurena. A fascinating
Sunday morning program by the versatile Bard Festival Chorale surveyed “sacred
and secular choral music from five centuries,” from Hernando Franco to Aaron
Copland.
Two symphonic programs made the deepest impression. One
featured the sumptuous cantata “Forest of the Amazon,” by Brazilian master
Heitor Villa-Lobos, in which soprano Nicole Cabell sang radiantly, and the
large orchestra was a riot of color. The other presented the complete Ginastera
ballet “Estancia,” which baritone Timothy Mix and the percussion-dominated
ensemble brought to repeated climaxes of thrilling passion. These musicians
present much unfamiliar repertoire in performances of unfailing polish and
conviction.
With a packed schedule at the festival, time to see nearby
attractions like the historic town of Rhinebeck and the homes of Hudson River
School artists Thomas Cole and Frederic Church can be scarce, but the natural
beauty of the Hudson Valley rewards all visitors.
