All Bard News by Date
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February 2024
02-12-2024
The Bard College Conservatory of Music and Graduate Vocal Arts Program present Jacques Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld). In a production by stage director Katherine M. Carter, the opera will be performed by Bard Conservatory of Music’s Vocal Arts Program singers with the Bard Conservatory Orchestra, conducted by James Bagwell, director of music performance studies and professor of music at Bard. The opera will be sung in French with English supertitles, and dialog will be in English. The performances will be held on Friday, March 8 at 8pm and on Sunday, March 10 at 2pm in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. Tickets start at $25, with $5 tickets for Bard students made possible by the Passloff Pass. The first performance (March 8) will be livestreamed. Virtual livestream tickets are pay what you wish. All ticket sales benefit the Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Scholarship Fund. To purchase or reserve tickets visit fishercenter.bard.edu, call 845-758-7900 (Mon-Fri 10am-5pm), or email [email protected].
Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld) welcomes the audience to a world of humans, gods, and goddesses that seems all too familiar. This is Olympus High, a place where the tipping scales of popularity and power provide the perfect backdrop for a tale of love, jealousy, and intrigue. This is prom and circumstance for the ages, a lively, witty operetta springing from the genius of a young, aspiring Jacques Offenbach in 1858, playing out here in the year 1986, where relationships and hierarchy haven’t changed a bit.
“It has been exciting to see the opera evolve under the artistic guidance of director Katherine Carter, who, along with the cast, is creating new dialogue to set the story in a 1980’s American high school,” says Associate Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program Kayo Iwama. “If you ever thought high school was ‘hell’, you will relate to this ironic twist on the classic love story of Orpheus and Eurydice!”
Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld) welcomes the audience to a world of humans, gods, and goddesses that seems all too familiar. This is Olympus High, a place where the tipping scales of popularity and power provide the perfect backdrop for a tale of love, jealousy, and intrigue. This is prom and circumstance for the ages, a lively, witty operetta springing from the genius of a young, aspiring Jacques Offenbach in 1858, playing out here in the year 1986, where relationships and hierarchy haven’t changed a bit.
“It has been exciting to see the opera evolve under the artistic guidance of director Katherine Carter, who, along with the cast, is creating new dialogue to set the story in a 1980’s American high school,” says Associate Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program Kayo Iwama. “If you ever thought high school was ‘hell’, you will relate to this ironic twist on the classic love story of Orpheus and Eurydice!”
Photo: Graduate Bard Conservatory of Music VAP students in rehearsal for the 2024 VAP Opera production of Orphée aux enfers (by Jacques Offenbach). L-R: Joseph Breslau, Emily Finke (seated in deep background), Nisha Caiozzi, Jun Mo Yang, Georgia Perdikoulias, Jacob Hunter, Sam Warshauer, Megan Maloney, Colton Cook, Abbegael Greene. Photo by Katrine Ottosen
Meta: Type(s): Event,General | Subject(s): Bard Conservatory,Bard Graduate Programs,Conservatory,Event,Opera | Institutes(s): Bard Conservatory of Music,Fisher Center |
Meta: Type(s): Event,General | Subject(s): Bard Conservatory,Bard Graduate Programs,Conservatory,Event,Opera | Institutes(s): Bard Conservatory of Music,Fisher Center |
02-06-2024
At the 66th annual GRAMMY Awards ceremony, the Recording Academy honored the 2024 GRAMMY winners. Among them, Bard Composer in Residence Jessie Montgomery won Best Contemporary Classical Composition, her first GRAMMY award, for her composition “Rounds.” Bard Conservatory of Music’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program alumna Julia Bullock MM ’11 also won her first GRAMMY award, winning Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for her album Walking in the Dark. Artistic Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program Stephanie Blythe is featured on the album Blanchard: Champion, which won for Best Opera Recording.
Jessie Montgomery’s “Rounds” is a composition for piano and string orchestra inspired by the imagery and themes from T.S. Eliot’s epic poem Four Quartets, fractals (infinite patterns found in nature that are self-similar across different scales), and the interdependency of all beings.
Julia Bullock’s Walking in the Dark was recorded with her husband, conductor and pianist Christian Reif, and London’s Philharmonia Orchestra. The album combines orchestral works by American composers John Adams and Samuel Barber with a traditional spiritual and songs by jazz legend Billy Taylor and singer-songwriters Oscar Brown, Jr., Connie Converse, and Sandy Denny.
The Metropolitan Opera’s recording of Terence Blanchard’s Champion, an opera about young boxer Emile Griffith who rises from obscurity to become a world champion, was conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and featured a cast including mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe as Kathy Hagen.![Artistic Director of the Bard College Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program Stephanie Blythe Artistic Director of the Bard College Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program Stephanie Blythe](https://tools.bard.edu/wwwmedia/pr/multi/images/19843/StephanieHeadshot2sq.jpg)
The GRAMMYs are voted on by more than 11,000 music professionals—performers, songwriters, producers, and others with credits on recordings—who are members of the Recording Academy.
Further Reading:
Jessie Montgomery’s “Rounds” Wins 2024 GRAMMY Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition
Julia Bullock Wins First Grammy Award with Walking in the Dark, Her Solo Album Debut
The Metropolitan Opera wins 2024 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording for Terence Blanchard’s Champion
Jessie Montgomery’s “Rounds” is a composition for piano and string orchestra inspired by the imagery and themes from T.S. Eliot’s epic poem Four Quartets, fractals (infinite patterns found in nature that are self-similar across different scales), and the interdependency of all beings.
Julia Bullock’s Walking in the Dark was recorded with her husband, conductor and pianist Christian Reif, and London’s Philharmonia Orchestra. The album combines orchestral works by American composers John Adams and Samuel Barber with a traditional spiritual and songs by jazz legend Billy Taylor and singer-songwriters Oscar Brown, Jr., Connie Converse, and Sandy Denny.
The Metropolitan Opera’s recording of Terence Blanchard’s Champion, an opera about young boxer Emile Griffith who rises from obscurity to become a world champion, was conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and featured a cast including mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe as Kathy Hagen.
![Artistic Director of the Bard College Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program Stephanie Blythe Artistic Director of the Bard College Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program Stephanie Blythe](https://tools.bard.edu/wwwmedia/pr/multi/images/19843/StephanieHeadshot2sq.jpg)
Artistic Director of the Bard College Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program Stephanie Blythe
The GRAMMYs are voted on by more than 11,000 music professionals—performers, songwriters, producers, and others with credits on recordings—who are members of the Recording Academy.
Further Reading:
Jessie Montgomery’s “Rounds” Wins 2024 GRAMMY Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition
Julia Bullock Wins First Grammy Award with Walking in the Dark, Her Solo Album Debut
The Metropolitan Opera wins 2024 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording for Terence Blanchard’s Champion
Photo: L-R: Bard Composer in Residence Jessie Montgomery (photo by Jiyang Chen) and Julia Bullock MM '11 (photo by Allison Michael Orenstein) win 2024 GRAMMY Awards.
Meta: Type(s): Alumni,Faculty | Subject(s): Alumni/ae,Bard Conservatory,Bard Graduate Programs,Division of the Arts,Music Program | Institutes(s): Bard Conservatory of Music |
Meta: Type(s): Alumni,Faculty | Subject(s): Alumni/ae,Bard Conservatory,Bard Graduate Programs,Division of the Arts,Music Program | Institutes(s): Bard Conservatory of Music |
02-01-2024
Artistic Director of Bard Conservatory of Music’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program and acclaimed mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe spoke to The Daily Catch ahead of her concert performance, Stephanie Blythe Sings Brahms, with The Orchestra Now at the Fisher Center on February 3–4. Renowned for the emotional depth of her performances, Blythe connects the lines of Brahm’s “Alto Rhapsody,” which uses Goethe’s poetry for lyrics, to “a feeling of a place where you can breathe. I understand the notion of breaking through and wanting to breathe. When you understand the universality of this music, you understand its essential nature,” says Blythe, who believes opera, when presented for what it actually is, can appeal to a broader, more popular audience. “Being able to illuminate and elevate opera in a new way is really important,” she said. “I find that far too often people who present opera feel like they need to repackage it. Opera doesn’t need to be excused. You don’t need to make it something else for people to appreciate it.”
Photo: Artistic Director of Bard Conservatory of Music’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program and acclaimed mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe.
Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Bard Conservatory,Bard Graduate Programs,Division of the Arts,Opera | Institutes(s): Bard Conservatory of Music |
Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Bard Conservatory,Bard Graduate Programs,Division of the Arts,Opera | Institutes(s): Bard Conservatory of Music |
listings 1-3 of 3