Bard Conservatory Orchestra Celebrates Works of Robert Schumann, Richard Strauss, and Ralph Vaughan Williams in March 11 Performance

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY— The Bard Conservatory Orchestra presents a concert celebrating works by Robert Schumann (1810-56), Richard Strauss (1864-1949), and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958). Conducted by Leon Botstein, music director, the program will feature Schumann’s Konzertstück for Four Horns and Orchestra, Op. 86, with horn players Erik Ralske, Javier Gándara, Hugo Valverde, and Barbara Jostlein Curry; Strauss’ Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration), Op. 24, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “A London Symphony.” The performance will be held on Saturday, March 11 at 8 p.m. in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. To reserve tickets, visit fishercenter.bard.edu, or call 845-758-7900 (Mon-Fri 10 am-5 pm).
 
Schumann was one of the earliest champions of what is known today as the French horn. All three movements of the Konzertstück, written by Schumann in 1849, are played without pause, demanding the utmost of the four horn players, giving them the fanfare-type material commonly associated with the horn, but also plenty of lyrical melodies.  He considered this work to be one of the best he had ever written.
 
At its inception, the symphonic poem was a bold attempt to create drama without words and to test music’s expressive powers to the fullest. The genre found a practitioner of genius in the young Richard Strauss. In a series of orchestral works that established him as one of the leading avant-gardists of the day, Strauss did not hesitate to tackle in his music the most complex literary and philosophical topics possible.  “It occurred to me to present in the form of a tone poem the dying hours of a man who had striven towards the highest idealistic aims, maybe indeed those of an artist,” Strauss wrote of Death and Transfiguration in 1894. 
 
Musicologist Wilfrid Mellers wrote that Vaughan Williams was a “double man,” deeply immersed in the Christian tradition and yet a self-described agnostic, looking into the future while spiritually most at home in the past. The “city,” to his way of thinking, was the antithesis of the “country”; it represented culture as opposed to nature, bustling activity as opposed to rural tranquility—and the composer, in a sense, was drawn to both. London, therefore, was both a real place and a metaphor for Williams who, in his 45-minute A London Symphony completed in 1913, combined descriptive realism and philosophical meditation.
   
About the Artists
In addition to serving as music director of the Bard Conservatory Orchestra, Leon Botstein is music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO), founder and music director of The Orchestra Now (TŌN), artistic codirector of Bard SummerScape and the Bard Music Festival, and conductor laureate of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, where he served as music director from 2003 to 2011. He has been guest conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Mariinsky Theatre, Russian National Orchestra in Moscow, London Philharmonic, Taipei Symphony, Simón Bolivar Symphony Orchestra, and Sinfónica Juvenil de Caracas in Venezuela, among others. Honors include Harvard University’s Centennial Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters award, and Cross of Honor, First Class, from the government of Austria, for his contributions to music. 
 
Javier Gándara, horn, has been a member of the Met Opera Orchestra since 1999. He graduated from The Juilliard School, where he studied with Ranier De Intinis. He has held positions with the Orquesta del Principado de Asturias, Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, Orquesta de Euskadi, and the Oregon Symphony. He is on faculty at the Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard Pre-College Division, and a regular guest faculty member at the Puerto Rico Conservatory.
 
Barbara Jöstlein Currie, horn, joined the Met Orchestra in 1998, as assistant horn. A year later, she won the 4th horn position which she has held since then. Growing up in Chicago and studying with former Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians Phil Farkas and Nancy Fako, she left for New York to study with former Met principal horn, Julie Landsman at the Juilliard school with a full scholarship. Along with teaching at the Bard Conservatory, she also teaches at Manhattan School of Music pre-college, and has given master classes at many universities such as Colburn and Cincinnati Conservatory, as well as in Japan. 
 
Erik Ralske, horn, has been principal horn of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra since the 2010-2011 season.  Prior to joining the Met, he was a member of the New York Philharmonic for 17 seasons. In recent years, he has played solo recitals in New York, Los Angeles, Kansas, Tokyo (at the invitation of the Japan Horn Society), Taipei, and Kaoshiung. During the same period, he led master classes at Juilliard, Showa University (Tokyo), Columbus State University, Dohai University (Taipei), University of Western Michigan, and University of Kansas. He is on the faculty of the Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, and Mannes College of Music
 
Hugo Valverde, horn, enjoys an active career as orchestral and solo musician and educator in the United States and his native Costa Rica as a French horn player. He has served as second horn with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra since 2017, and performed with the Costa Rican National Symphony Orchestra, Classical Tahoe Festival Orchestra, The Strings Music Festival Brass Ensemble in Colorado, Orchestra of the Americas, Pacific Music Festival in Japan, New York City Ballet, and The Philadelphia Orchestra, among others. During the pandemic he created the “Lockdown Warmups” project, which provided free on-line masterclasses and coaching with symphony orchestra musicians for young Latin American horn players. Mr. Valverde studied at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, Lynn University Conservatory of Music, and the National Music Institute in San José, Costa Rica. He is a member of the horn faculty at the Bard Conservatory and at the Juilliard Pre-College Division.
  About the Bard College Conservatory
Bard College Conservatory of Music expands Bard’s spirit of innovation in arts and education. The Conservatory, which opened in 2005, offers a five-year, double-degree program at the undergraduate level and, at the graduate level, programs in vocal arts, conducting, and instrumental performance, as well as Chinese music and culture. Also at the graduate level, the Conservatory offers an Advanced Performance Studies Program and a two-year Post-graduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship. The US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, established in 2017, offers a unique degree program in Chinese instruments. The Conservatory Orchestra has performed twice at Lincoln Center, and has completed three international concert tours to China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan; Russia and six cities in Central and Eastern Europe; and to three cities in Cuba. bard.edu/conservatory
 

This event was last updated on 02-14-2023

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