Bard Music Festival Turns to Latin America with In-Depth Survey of Music by Carlos Chávez and His Contemporaries (Aug 7–16) as Centerpiece of 2015 Bard SummerScape Festival

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. – The Bard Music Festival breaks new ground this summer, turning for the first time to Latin America with a two-week, in-depth exploration of “Carlos Chávez and His World.” In eleven themed concert programs, complemented by pre-concert lectures, panel discussions, special events, and expert commentary, Bard examines Carlos Chávez (1899–1978), the central figure in 20th-century Mexican music. Weekend One considers his achievement in helping create The Musical Voice of Mexico (August 7–9), and Weekend Two offers an immersion in Mexico, Latin America, and Modernism (August 14–16). Enriched by a wealth of compositions from Chávez’s predecessors and contemporaries, and addressing wider questions of Mexican musical identity, all events will take place in the striking Frank Gehry-designed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on Bard College’s glorious Hudson River campus. As in previous seasons, the 26th annual Bard Music Festival is set not only to provide the creative inspiration for Bard SummerScape 2015, but also to prove itself once again “the summer’s most stimulating music festival” (Los Angeles Times).

The New York Times observes, “The Bard Music Festival has managed more than its fair share of ambitious feats in its immersive annual examinations of classical music’s major composers.” Drawing on recent scholarship, the festival’s signature thematic programming, multi-disciplinary approach, and emphasis on context and reception history make for a depth and breadth of cultural discovery that appeals to classical music novices and aficionados alike. Since its inception, the Bard Music Festival and its co-founder and co-artistic director Leon Botstein have infused the standard concert repertory with a host of important rediscoveries. As the New Yorker’s Alex Ross puts it, “Bard SummerScape and Bard Music Festival always unearth piles of buried treasure.” And while the Bard Music Festival’s pioneering approach to thematic programming has sometimes been emulated, “Nothing quite compares to the fascinating summer programs popping out of Leon Botstein’s brain” (Bloomberg News).

Now in his 22nd year as music director of the resident American Symphony Orchestra, Maestro Botstein – recently recognized as “one of the most remarkable figures in the worlds of arts and culture” (THIRTEEN/WNET) – will lead the ensemble in all three of the Bard Music Festival’s orchestral programs. As in previous seasons, choral works will feature the Bard Festival Chorale directed by James Bagwell, and vocal and chamber programs will boast an impressive roster of guest artists.

A protean force as composer, conductor, teacher, journalist, and visionary cultural ambassador, Carlos Chávez embodied 20th-century Mexican music; as his New York Times obituary put it, “for more than half a century, [he] stood in the eyes of the world for the best in Mexican music.” While incorporating modernist techniques into his music, he was also among the first to reference his homeland’s indigenous past, and played a crucial part in the “indigenismo” movement, celebrating his native culture. In a handful of major works, Chávez drew inspiration and strength from Mexican themes, and it was his synthesis of markers of Mexican identity with modernist techniques that led Aaron Copland to judge him “one of the first authentic signs of a New World with its own new music.”

As a conductor, Chávez not only founded the Orquesta Sinfónica de México, directing it for more than two decades, but also guest conducted such leading U.S. ensembles as the Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Philadelphia Orchestra, championing works by composers including Copland, Colin McPhee, Henry Cowell, and Amadeo Roldán, and leading Mexican premieres of music by Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Hindemith, Milhaud, and Falla. Through his work as a governmental arts administrator and founder of several major Mexican cultural institutions, among them the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Chávez brought international visibility to Mexican musical and cultural life.

Maintaining such visibility remains, however, a work in progress. Despite the tireless efforts of Chávez and other of his compatriots, their compositions are still all too seldom programmed in U.S., European, and Asian concert halls, and very few have achieved anything like broad recognition by the concert-going public. Bard seeks to redress this balance, taking Chávez’s life and career as the lens through which to examine a vibrant cultural period in Mexico and Latin America. His life encompassed the Mexican Revolution, which was followed by a period of cultural renaissance in literature, film, the visual arts, and music, providing rich material for a reassessment of his homeland.

Bard’s festival launches with Program One, “Chávez and Mexico’s Musical Heritage,” which offers an introduction to Mexican music since the colonial period of New Spain, culminating with the work of Chávez and his 20th-century contemporaries. Featured composers include Manuel de Sumaya, whose style reflects the influence of the Italian Baroque on Spanish culture; Ernesto Elorduy, Felipe Villanueva, and Juventino Rosas, three Romantic pianist-composers of the long “Porfiriato” era; Manuel M. Ponce, with whom, as a teenager, Chávez studied piano; and Silvestre Revueltas, who served under Chávez as assistant conductor of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México. Representing Chávez’s own oeuvre are chamber works including Xochipili: An Imaginary Aztec Music (1940), originally scored for indigenous Indian instruments, in which he sought – without access to actual Aztec melodies or rhythms – to project something of their neoprimitive musical aesthetic.

In the early 1920s, after the Mexican Revolution, Chávez undertook a musical pilgrimage to Europe and experienced first hand the emergence of modern music in New York through his association with Edgard Varèse and the Composers’ Guild. Back in Mexico, Chávez organized concerts featuring music by such luminaries of the Parisian scene as Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc (both members of Les Six), Varèse, and Stravinsky. Program Two, “The Parisian Influence,” explores this exposure to modernism, juxtaposing works by the Europeans with some of those they helped inspire, not only by Chávez, but also by Ponce and José Rolón, both of whom were members of Paul Dukas’s composition class.

Bard’s first orchestral concert – Program 3, “Mexico: The Crossroad of Antifascism” – considers Chávez as conductor as well as composer, and the works he chose to showcase in his 21 years as Music Director of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México. These included Honegger’s Third Symphony “Liturgique” (1945–46), composed in the wake of World War II, and his own Sinfonía de Antígona (1933), which draws on the incidental music he composed for Jean Cocteau’s modernist take on the Sophocles tragedy. By contrast, because Chávez accepted but never actually programmed it, the Piece for Orchestra (c. 1945) by Conlon Nancarrow – the American experimentalist who escaped to Mexico to avoid persecution as a former communist – went unheard until 2004, and is only now to receive its American premiere. A similarly complex history attends the score for the leftist film Redes (1934–35), a joint project of Chávez and photographer Paul Strand for the education of the Mexican working classes. Co-directed by Emilio Gómez Muriel and Fred Zinnemann (High Noon, From Here to Eternity, and A Man For All Seasons), the film was released in the U.S. as The Wave, becoming one of the most important examples of Mexican cinema’s “golden age.” The film score was originally to have been written by Chávez, but was eventually consigned to Revueltas, which may have contributed to the breakup of their friendship.

As they emerged from the long years of revolution, the Mexican people developed a renewed sense of identity and purpose that would have profound cultural ramifications, as Program Four, “Music and the 10-Year Mexican Revolution” discovers. The artistic renaissance that followed the prolonged and bloody civil war saw the creation of explicitly national works addressing the indigenous, mestizo, and/or modern aspects of Mexican culture, by Chávez, Revueltas, and others, including Blas Galindo and José Pablo Moncayo, two of Chávez’s star composition students at the National Conservatory of Music. Both became close associates of the older composer, Galindo succeeding him as director of the National Conservatory, and Moncayo as artistic director of the Orquesta Sinfónica de México.

The burgeoning nationalism of the era was embodied by the world-renowned Mexican muralist movement. Spearheaded by the “big three” – Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros – this saw the promotion of murals bearing social and political messages, in an attempt to reunify the country under the post-revolutionary government. In Program Five, “Music, Murals and Puppets,” Bard concludes the festival’s opening weekend with works that capture something of the murals’ riotous color, bold strokes, neoprimitivism, and larger-than-life aesthetic. Subtitled “Dance Pantomime for Children,” Revueltas’s wind symphony Troka was written to accompany a children’s radio broadcast advocating the use of technology and the downfall of imperialism. In Falla’s one-act puppet chamber opera El retablo de maese Pedro, based on an episode from Don Quixote, the Spanish composer began the transition into the Hispanic neo-classicism of his later works. Chávez’s Suite for the Double Quartet is taken from The Daughter of Colchis (Dark Meadow) (1943), a ballet commissioned for Martha Graham, of which the New York Times declared: “It’s about sex.” Doug Fitch will design and direct the program.

In breaking away from the traditional European focus on melody and harmony, the genesis of the independent percussion ensemble has often been linked to interest in the music and philosophy of non-Western cultures. American maverick John Cage was especially drawn to Eastern philosophies, and it was he who first approached Chávez to compose his formidably challenging Toccata (1942), which proved to be a pioneering achievement in legitimizing unaccompanied percussion ensemble performance. In Program Six, “East and West,” on the first evening of Bard’s final weekend, Toccata will share the program with Varèse’s Ionisation and other music for percussion by Cage, Henry Cowell, Cuba’s Amadeo Roldán, and Lou Harrison, whose Threnody for Carlos Chávez (1979), scored for viola and Sundanese gamelan, explicitly seeks to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western cultures.

Chávez traveled many times to New York, spending almost two years there in the late 1920s, where he became part of the modern music scene and, together with his friend, painter Miguel Covarrubias, developed a fascination with Afro-American dance music of the Harlem Renaissance. Later, his numerous guest-conducting engagements in the city included leading the New York Philharmonic and a series of concerts with Toscanini’s NBC Symphony Orchestra. Program Seven, “New York New York” celebrates this association, presenting several of the piano pieces Chávez composed and saw premiered in New York, like his Third Piano Sonata, Blues and Fox (all 1928), together with works by some of the New York-based composers who most vociferously championed him as a progressive voice in American music, most notably Varèse, Copland, and Cowell.

For all Chávez’s advocacy of his homeland’s pre-Hispanic musical heritage, he had in fact very limited knowledge of it beyond that of the Indians of Tlaxcala, with which he had been familiar since childhood. Instead, he relied largely on his imagination, even in Sinfonía india (1935), the one-movement masterwork by which he is still best known. Although it is scored for indigenous percussion as well as orchestral instruments, and incorporates melodic material collected from Mexico’s Cora, and Seri Indians, ultimately the piece is modeled most closely on classical sonata form, its Mexican elements interpreted from the European perspective Chávez had internalized. Nonetheless, in the imaginary past it conjures, he succeeded in creating a sound that would come to be heard as identifiably Mexican. In the second orchestral concert of the festival, Program Eight, “Reimagined Landscapes and Pasts,” Bard presents the Sinfonía india alongside comparably evocative attempts to reconstruct Latin America’s pre-colonial roots, by Revueltas, Moncayo, and Brazilian legend Heitor Villa-Lobos.

Mexico boasts a choral tradition as long and rich as it is little known; indeed, it is only in the past 70 years that scholars have begun to study and catalogue what is stored in the Mexican cathedral archives. In Program Nine, “Sacred and Secular Choral Music from 5 Centuries,” Bard offers a rare opportunity to sample this little-tapped resource together with other choral music of the New World. Introduced with commentary are selections by composers ranging from Spanish-born Renaissance composers Hernando Franco and Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, to Francisco López Capillas, Mexico’s most prolific composer of Baroque masses who, like Sumaya and Franco, served as chapel master of the Mexico City Cathedral; and from Italian-trained Juan Bautista Plaza Alfonso, of Venezuela’s Caracas Cathedral, to Chávez and Copland.

Chávez undertook a number of U.S. teaching engagements in the late 1950s, at Tanglewood’s Berkshire Music Festival, as a visiting professor at the University of Buffalo, and as Harvard’s 1958–59 Charles Eliot Norton Poetic Chair. Bard’s final chamber concert, Program Ten, “Post-World War II Latin America,” pairs Chávez’s works with others from the same period by such composers as Argentina’s Astor Piazzolla, of nuevo tango fame, Alberto Ginastera, Panama’s Roque Cordero, and Peruvian Celso Garrido-Lecca.

In Program Eleven, Musical Culture of the Hemisphere, Bard presents a selection of some of Latin America’s most important contributions to the orchestral literature. Written to symbolize the economic relationship between the industrial United States and the agricultural tropics, Chávez’s ballet symphony, H.P. (Horse Power, 1932) is a vital score, rich in orchestral color, which achieves a synthesis between the influence of Stravinsky and popular Mexican dance idioms. Also on the program is Alberto Nepomuceno’s Série Brasileira; the First Symphony (1901) of Julián Carrillo, the German-trained Mexican composer best known for developing a theory of microtonal music; and Estancia (1941), an orchestral suite by Ginastera. With this program, the 26th annual Bard Music Festival draws to a gripping close.

Besides the eleven concert programs, there will be a special event presenting “Music by Contemporary Latin American Composers,” a recreation of a program created by Chávez for the 1940 exhibition “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a film showing of The Other Conquest (1991). Three free panel discussions – “Culture and National Identity: The Case of Mexico,” “Mexico and the United States: Past, Present, and Future,” and “Mexico and Latin America” – will be supplemented by informative pre-concert talks to illuminate each program’s themes. These pre-concert talks are free to ticket-holders and, as has become traditional, the first of them will be given by Maestro Botstein himself.

Since the founding of the Bard Music Festival with “Brahms and His World” in 1990, Princeton University Press has published a companion volume of new scholarship and interpretation each season, with essays and translated documents relating to the featured composer and his milieu. Scholar-in-Residence Dr. Leonora Saavedra, whose publications include articles on Chávez, Ponce, and Mexican opera, is the editor of the upcoming 2015 volume, Carlos Chávez and His World.

Dubbed “part boot camp for the brain, part spa for the spirit” by the New York Times, the Bard Music Festival has impressed critics worldwide. NPR named it “one of the ‘10 Can’t-Miss Classical Music Festivals,’” and on his blog, Boston Globe journalist Steve Smith confessed:

“For an unrepentant music geek like me, the Bard Music Festival is simply irresistible: a fabulous wealth of music by a major composer from the classical tradition, surrounded and contextualized with works by forebears, peers, colleagues, friends, enemies, students, followers – you name it.”
The New York Times reports that “performers engaged by Bard invariably seem energized by the prospect of extending beyond canonical routine, and by an audience that comes prepared with open ears and open minds” for the “two-weekend musicological intensive doubling as a sumptuous smorgasbord of concerts.” As the Wall Street Journal’s Barrymore Laurence Scherer observes:

“The Bard Music Festival … no longer needs an introduction. Under the provocative guidance of the conductor-scholar Leon Botstein, it has long been one of the most intellectually stimulating of all American summer festivals and frequently is one of the most musically satisfying. Each year, through discussions by major scholars and illustrative concerts often programmed to overflowing, Bard audiences have investigated the oeuvre of a major composer in the context of the society, politics, literature, art, and music of his times.”
 
Getting to the Bard Music Festival: New York City Round-Trip Bus Transportation
Round-trip bus service is provided exclusively to ticket-holders for the performances marked with an asterisk below. A reservation is required, and may be made by calling the box office at 845-758-7900. The round-trip fare is $40, and the bus departs from Lincoln Center at the times indicated:


Program 1: Friday, August 7 at 8 pm 3:30 pm
Program 5: Sunday, August 9 at 5:30 pm (preconcert talk at 5 pm) 1:30 pm
Program 6: Friday, August 14 at 8 pm (preconcert talk at 7:30 pm) 3:30 pm
Program 11: Sunday, August 16 at 4:30 pm (preconcert talk at 3:30 pm) 12:00 pm
Further details are available at fishercenter.bard.edu/transportation.

Bard’s sensationally popular European Spiegeltent will be open for lunch and dinner throughout “Chávez and His World,” as well as for cabaret performances by Suzanne Vega (August 8), Taylor Mac (August 14), and returning host, emcee, and guest curator Justin Vivian Bond (August 15).

 


 

Program details of Bard Music Festival, “Chávez and His World”

 

WEEKEND ONE: The Musical Voice of Mexico

 

Friday, August 7

 

PROGRAM ONE*

Chávez and Mexico’s Musical Heritage

Sosnoff Theater

8 pm            Performance with commentary by Leon Botstein; with Daedalus Quartet; Ava Pine, soprano; Anna Polonsky, piano; Jason Vieaux, guitar; Erika Switzer, piano; Orion Weiss, piano; Members of the American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director

Carlos Chávez (1899–1978)

   H.P. Danse des hommes et des machines (1926)

   Unidad (1930)

   String Quartet No. 3 (1943)

   from Ten Preludes (1937)

   Xochipili: An Imaginary Aztec Music (1940)

Manuel M. Ponce (1882–1948)

   Concierto del sur (1941)

Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940)

   Ranas (1931)

   Toccata (sin fuga) (1933)

Songs and other works by Manuel de Sumaya (c.1678–1755); Juventino Rosas (1868–94); Felipe Villanueva (1862–93); Gustavo Campa (1863–1934); Ricardo Castro (1864–1907); Ernesto Elorduy (1854–1913); Julián Carrillo (1875–1965); and José Pablo Moncayo (1912–58)

Tickets: $25–$60

 

Saturday, August 8

 

PANEL ONE

Culture and National Identity: The Case of Mexico

Olin Hall

10 am–noon

Claudio Lomnitz; Alejandro L. Madrid; Leonora Saavedra

Free and open to the public

 

PROGRAM TWO

The Parisian Influence

Olin Hall

1 pm            Pre-concert Talk: Byron Adams

1:30 pm            Performance: Amphion String Quartet; Bradley Brookshire, harpsichord; Joseph Eletto, baritone; Benjamin Fingland, clarinet; Simon Ghraichy, piano; Brian Zeger, piano; Ava Pine, soprano; Lance Suzuki, flute; Jason Vieaux, guitar; Bard Festival Chamber Players

 

Carlos Chávez (1899–1978)

   Seis exágonos (1923–24)

   Sonatina, for piano (1924)

   36 (1925)

   Trio (1940)

Paul Dukas (1865–1935)

   La plainte, au loin, du faune (1920)

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)

   5 Mélodies populaires grecques (1904–6)

José Rolón (1876–1945)

   String Quartet (ca. 1920)

Manuel M. Ponce (1882–1948)

   Sonata, for guitar and harpsichord (c. 1926)

Darius Milhaud (1892–1974)

   Catalogue de fleurs, Op. 60 (1920)

Francis Poulenc (1899–1963)

   Rapsodie nègre (1917)

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)

   Tango (1940)

Tickets: $35



PROGRAM THREE

Music and Politics

Sosnoff Theater

7 pm            Pre-concert Talk: Sergio Vela

8 pm            Performance: Jorge Federico Osorio, piano; American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director

Carlos Chávez (1899–1978)

   Sinfonía de Antígona (1933)

   Piano Concerto (1938)

Arthur Honegger (1892–1955)

   Symphony No. 3 “Liturgique” (1945–46)

Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940)

   Redes (1934–35)

Conlon Nancarrow (1912–97)

   Piece for Orchestra (U.S. premiere)

Tickets: $25–$75



Sunday, August 9

PANEL TWO

Mexico and the United States: Past, Present, and Future

Olin Hall

10 am–noon

Free and open to the public

PROGRAM FOUR

Music and the 10-Year Mexican Revolution

Olin Hall

1 pm            Pre-concert Talk: Ricardo Miranda

1:30 pm            Performance: Maria Bachmann, violin; Daedalus Quartet; Cecilia Violetta López, soprano; Nicholas Phan, tenor; Anna Polonsky, piano; Erika Switzer, piano; Benjamin Verdery, guitar; Orion Weiss, piano; Bard Festival Chamber Players

 

Carlos Chávez (1899–1978)

   Adelita y La cucaracha (1915)

   Las margaritas, canción mexicana tradicional (1919)

   Jarabe, baile mexicano tradicional (1922)

   Three Pieces, for guitar (1923)

   Sonatina, for violin and piano (1924)

   Foxtrot (1925)

   Cuatro melodías tradicionales indias del Ecuador (1942)

Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940)

   Tierra pa’ las macetas (c. 1924)

   String Quartet No. 4 “Música de feria” (1932)

   Ocho por radio (1933)

Songs and works for guitar or piano by José Rolón (1876–1945); José Pomar (1880–1961); Manuel M. Ponce (1882–1948); Tata Nacho (1894–1968); Alfonso Esparza Oteo (1894–1950); Blas Galindo (1910–93); José Pablo Moncayo (1912–58); and others

Tickets: $35

 

PROGRAM FIVE*

Music, Murals, and Puppets

Sosnoff Theater

5 pm            Pre-concert Talk: Roberto Kolb Neuhaus

5:30 pm            Performance: Amphion String Quartet; Benjamin Fingland, clarinet; Cecilia Violetta López, soprano; Louis Otey, baritone; Nicholas Phan, tenor; Lance Suzuki, flute; members of the American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director; designed and directed by Doug Fitch; and others

Carlos Chávez (1899–1978)

   Suite for Double Quartet, from The Daughter of Colchis (Dark Meadow) (1943)

Manuel de Falla (1876–1946)

   El retablo de maese Pedro (1922)

Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940)

   Troka (1933)

   El renacuajo paseador (1936)

Tickets: $25–$60



WEEKEND TWO: Mexico, Latin America, and Modernism

 

Thursday, August 13

 

SPECIAL EVENTS

Music by Contemporary Latin American Composers

LUMA Theater

7:30 pm Performance by Contemporaneous

 

Works by Esteban Benzecry (b. 1970); Enrico Chapela (b. 1974); Angélica Negrón (b. 1981); Vicente Alexim (b. 1987); Itzam Zapata (b. 1989); and Andrés Martinez de Velasco Escobedo ’15 (b. 1991)

Tickets: $25

 

Friday, August 14

 

Special Events

Ottaway Film Center

3 pm Film Showing

 

The Other Conquest / La Otra Conquista (dir. Salvador Carrasco ’91)

 

Free and open to the public

Orquesta Mexicana

Olin Hall

5 pm Performance by Orquesta Mexicana

Works by Carlos Chávez (1899–1978) and others originally presented at the Museum of Modern Art, 1940.

Tickets: $25

 

PROGRAM SIX*

East and West

Sosnoff Theater

7:30 pm            Pre-concert Talk: Kyle Gann

8 pm            Performance: Alessio Bax, piano; Lucille Chung, piano; Zohar Schondorf, horn; Jessica Thompson, viola; Eric Cha-Beach, Joshua Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and students of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, percussion; Catskill Mountain Gamelan

 

Carlos Chávez (1899–1978)

   Toccata (1942)

Henry Cowell (1897–1965)

   Ostinato pianissimo (1934)

Amadeo Roldán (1900–39)

   Rítmicas 5 and 6 (1930)

Colin McPhee (1900–64)

  Balinese Ceremonial Music (transcr. 1934)

John Cage (1912–92)

   Construction No. 3 (1939–42)

Lou Harrison (1917–2003)

   Threnody for Carlos Chávez (1979)

   Main Bersama-sama (1978)

John Cage/Lou Harrison

   Double Music (1941)

Tickets: $25–$60

 

Saturday, August 15

 

PANEL THREE

Mexico and Latin America

Olin Hall

10 am–noon

Free and open to the public



PROGRAM SEVEN

“New York New York”

Olin Hall

1 pm            Pre-concert Talk: Christopher H. Gibbs

1:30 pm            Performance: Alessio Bax, piano; Randolph Bowman, flute; Daedalus Quartet; Lucille Chung, piano; Ieva Jokubaviciute, piano; Romie de Guise-Langlois, clarinet; Sarah Shafer, soprano

 

Carlos Chávez (1899–1978)

   Piano Sonata No. 3 (1928)

   Blues (1928)

   Fox (1928)

   North Carolina Blues (1942)

Edgard Varèse (1883–1965)

   Density 21.5 (1936)

Henry Cowell (1897–1965)

   Quartet Euphometric (1919)

Aaron Copland (1900–90)

   Sextet (1937)

Songs and piano works by Dane Rudhyar (1895–1985); William Grant Still (1895–1978); Roger Sessions (1896–1985); Virgil Thomson (1896–1989); Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940); Ruth Crawford (1901–53); Israel Citkowitz (1909–74); Paul Bowles (1910–99); and Conlon Nancarrow (1912–97)

Tickets: $35



PROGRAM EIGHT

Reimagined Landscapes and Pasts

Sosnoff Theater

7 pm            Pre-concert Talk: Leonora Saavedra

8 pm            Performance: Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director; American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director

Carlos Chávez (1899–1978)

   Sinfonía india (1935)

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959)

   Amazonas (1917)

   Forest of the Amazons (1958)

Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940)

   Cuauhnáhuac (1930)

José Pablo Moncayo (1912–58)

   Three Pieces for Orchestra (1947)

Tickets: $25–$75



Sunday, August 16



PROGRAM NINE

Sacred and Secular Choral Music from 5 Centuries

Olin Hall

10 am            Performance with commentary, with Bard Festival Chorale, conducted by James Bagwell, choral director

 

Choral works by Hernando Franco (1532–85); Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla (c. 1590–1664); Francisco López Capillas (c. 1615–73); Manuel de Sumaya (c. 1678–1755); Manuel de Falla (1876–1946); Juan Bautista Plaza (1898–1965); Carlos Chávez (1899–1978); and Aaron Copland (1900–90)

 

Tickets starting at $30

 

PROGRAM TEN

Post-World War II Latin America

Olin Hall

1 pm            Preconcert Talk: Richard Wilson

1:30 pm            Performance: Harlem Quartet; Ieva Jokubaviciute, piano; Orion Weiss, piano; and others


Carlos Chávez (1899–1978)

   From Five Caprichos (1975)

Alberto Ginastera (1916–83)

  Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 22 (1952)

Celso Garrido-Lecca (b. 1926)

  String Quartet No. 2 (1988)

Works by Juan José Castro (1895–1968); Roque Cordero (1917–2008); Astor Piazzolla (1921–92); and others

 

Tickets: $35

 

 

PROGRAM ELEVEN*

Musical Culture of the Hemisphere

Sosnoff Theater

3:30 pm            Pre-concert Talk: Walter Clark

4:30 pm            Performance: American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director

Carlos Chávez (1899–1978)

   H.P., Ballet Symphony (1932)

Alberto Nepomuceno (1864–1920)

  Série Brasileira (1892)

Julián Carrillo (1875–1965)

   Symphony No. 1 in D major (1901)

Alberto Ginastera (1916–83)

   Estancia, Op. 8 (1941)

Tickets: $25–$75

 

Bard SummerScape ticket information

For tickets and further information on all SummerScape events, call the Fisher Center box office at 845-758-7900 or visit www.fishercenter.bard.edu. Fisher Center members receive priority access to the best seats in advance, and those who join the Center’s email list receive advance booking opportunities as well as regular news and updates.

Bard SummerScape: fishercenter.bard.edu/summerscape

Bard Music Festival: fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf

 

Tickets and Subscriptions: fishercenter.bard.edu/tickets; or by phone at 845-758-7900. Tickets start at $25.

 

Updates: Bard’s “e-members” get all the news in regular updates.
Click here to sign up, or send an e-mail to [email protected].

 

All program information is subject to change.

 

This season is made possible in part through the generous support of the Board of the Bard Music Festival and the Friends of the Fisher Center, as well as grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Additional underwriting has been provided by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, James H. Ottaway Jr., Felicitas S. Thorne, Helen and Roger Alcaly, Bettina Baruch Foundation, Michelle R. Clayman, Margo and Anthony Viscusi, and the Furthermore Foundation. Special support has also been provided by the Mrs. Mortimer Levitt Endowment Fund for the Performing Arts. The Festival thanks the Mexican Cultural Institute in New York for their support.

 

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This event was last updated on 03-31-2015

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