The Bard Conservatory Orchestra, in partnership with the Bard Music Festival, gives international concert tours every other year.
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International Concert ToursIn 2012 the orchestra made a three-week tour of greater China, performing in Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Wuhan and Guangzhou. In June 2014 the Conservatory orchestra did a three-week concert tour of Europe with performances in Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Budapest, Bratislava, Vienna, Prague and Berlin. For more information about past and future tours please click on the links below:
In non-tour years the orchestra performs concerts in the United States at such venues as Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, and Sanders Theater in Cambridge, MA. -
About the Bard Music FestivalArtistic Directors
- Leon Botstein
- Christopher H. Gibbs
- Robert Martin
Executive Director
- Irene Zedlacher
Associate Director
- Raissa St. Pierre ’87
Founded in 1990, the Bard Music Festival has established its unique identity in the classical concert field by presenting programs that, through performance and discussion, place selected works in the cultural and social context of the composer’s world. Programs of the Bard Music Festival offer a point of view.About the Bard Music Festival
The intimate communication of chamber music and the excitement of full orchestral and choral works are complemented by informative preconcert talks, panel discussions by renowned musicians and scholars, and special events. In addition, each season Princeton University Press publishes a book of essays, translations, and correspondence relating to the festival’s central figure. By providing an illuminating context, the festival encourages listeners and musicians alike to rediscover the powerful, expressive nature of familiar compositions and to become acquainted with less well-known works. Since its inaugural season, the Bard Music Festival has entered the worlds of Brahms, Mendelssohn, Richard Strauss, Dvořák, Schumann, Bartók, Ives, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, Schoenberg, Beethoven, Debussy, Mahler, Janáček, Shostakovich, Copland, Liszt, Elgar, Prokofiev, Wagner, Berg, Sibelius, Saint-Saëns, and Stravinsky. -
About the Bard Conservatory OrchestraThe Bard Conservatory Orchestra consists of 90 gifted students drawn from around the world. With its music director Leon Botstein it has performed twice at Lincoln Center in New York, at Sanders Theater at Harvard, and in Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjing, Guangzhou, and Wuhan during a three-week concert tour of Asia. The Bard College Conservatory of Music, founded in 2005 as a special five-year double-degree program within Bard College, has a world-class faculty that includes soprano Dawn Upshaw, pianist Peter Serkin, and violinists Weigang Li and Ida Kavafian, to name just a few.
About the Bard Conservatory Orchestra
Students are recruited from the United States and from all over the world, including Australia, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Palestine, Poland, Slovakia, South Korea, Ukraine, and Venezuela.
Following the Bard Conservatory Orchestra’s performance at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater in May 2011, critic David Griesinger wrote: “From the first notes it was obvious that these young players understood what was to come…This was easily the most moving performance of this amazing piece [Shostakovich Symphony No. 5] that I have heard. Special credit goes, of course, to Botstein, but he had the help of some magnificent playing…”