Summer Festival Preview: Bard SummerScape

False Tsars and Polish piano mastery mark this year's festival.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The Murder of the False Dmitry by Konstantin Makovsky
gives some idea of the mayhem to come at this summer's Bard Festival.
Image from Wikimedia Commons.

The rolling greens of Bard College, located just off the Hudson River in the quaint but practical little town of Annandale-on-Hudson, welcome music lovers once more. The attraction: Bard SummerScape, offering six weeks of classical music, academic programming and as always, a unique opera that you probably won't hear anywhere else anytime soon.

Superconductor 2016 Summer Festival Preview III: Bard Festival

Up the Hudson, the Bard Festival revisits Puccini.

by Paul J. Pelkonen

Just a settin' on the lawn. No, that statue of Puccini isn't really there.
Original photo of the Fisher Center © A. Zahner and Co.

The third part of our Summer Festival Preview features the Bard Festival, that celebration of the forgotten and the unusual in symphonic and operatic music of the 19th and 20th centuries. Held on the sprawling verdant campus of Bard College and fcused around the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center For the Performing Arts, Bard has a reputation as one of the elite summer festivals, a grand day out at the opera that is worth the long trip.

Opera Review: Love on the Rocks

Ethyl Smyth's The Wreckers rises from the vasty deep.
by Paul J. Pelkonen
(This article is presented in collaboration with our friends at OperaPulse.)

Wrecking crew: (L-r) Katharine Goeldner, Sky Ingram, Michael Mayes, Neal Cooper and Kendra Broom 
in rehearsal for Dame Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers.
Photo by Stephanie Berger © 2015 Bard SummerScape.

Each summer, it is the business of the Bard SummerScape Festival to present an opera that for whatever reason has fallen far from the fringes of the standard repertory. On Friday night, artistic director and Bard College president) Leon Botstein led the first fully staged performance of The Wreckers the 1907 opera by Dame Ethyl Smyth. (The work was first performed in the U.S. by the American Symphony Orchestra under Dr. Botstein at Carnegie Hall in 2007.) This was the first of five scheduled performances this month at the Fisher Center, the Frank Gehry-designed concert hall on the Bard campus that is SummerScape's headquarters.

Opera Preview: Le Roi malgré lui

Leon Botstein unearths a rare gem by Emmanuel Chabrier.
by Paul J. Pelkonen
"I would rather have written Le Roi malgré lui than the Ring of the Nibelungen."--Maurice Ravel

Costume design for the Cossacks in Le Roi malgré lui.
Costume design sketch by Mattie Ulrich © Bard Festival 2012.

This year's Bard Festival is devoted to the music and culture of 19th century France. As a result, the July opera offering at the Fisher Center (located on the picturesque campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson) isLe Roi malgré lui, ("The King in Spite of Himself") a rarely performed comedy by French composer Emmauel Chabrier.

Chabrier is best remembered by opera lovers for writing L'Etoile, a surreal comedy of kingship and succession that has been mounted occasionally at Glimmerglass and at the New York City Opera. Le Roi deals with some similar themes.

It is the story of a ne'er-do-well French nobleman, Henri, who somehow finds himself in line to take the throne of Poland. The opera's plot mainly consists of the reluctant king's increasingly convoluted efforts to escape the country and the pressures of his job.