Opera Review: This House Aches

Bard SummerScape presents Taneyev's Oresteia.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Detail from The Remorse of Orestes by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1862.)
Image from Project Gutenberg, used under license through Wikimedia Commons.

A summer visit to the Fisher Center, that Frank Gehry-designed theater plunked down in the rolling greens of Bard College means that the average opera-lover is going to hear something that they've never heard before. On Friday night, Bard President (and Bard SummerScape music director) Leon Botstein offered up the United States stage premiere of Oresteia, by forgotten Russian composer Sergei Taneyev. Dr. Botstein conducted the American Symphony Orchestra, who played this sumptuous music at their usual high standard of execution.