CONDUCTORS INSTITUTE AT BARD COLLEGE ANNOUNCES ITS SUMMER 2006 PROGRAM “No serious conductor should miss the opportunity to study at the Institute.”—Marin Alsop

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—The Bard College Conservatory of Music presents the 2006 summer program of The Conductors Institute (CI) at Bard from June 26 to August 4. The Institute, founded and directed by conductor and composer Harold Farberman, offers programs for professional and student conductors and composers. Participants in the six-week summer program work directly with Maestro Farberman, who anchors the faculty of guest conductors and composers in residence. New visiting faculty and new repertoire each week assure all Institute participants of exposure to a variety of expert opinions. In addition, there are evening lectures with internationally known scholars, composers, and conductors. Farberman founded the Conductors Institute in 1979 to fill a void in the United States for a training program for conductors. “I hit on a formula that remains the same to this day—vigorous technical training and promotion of American music in a cooperative atmosphere,” he said. The 2006 Institute’s visiting maestri include special guest Marin Alsop, Guillermo Figueroa, Raymond Harvey, Apo Hsu, and Sidney Rothstein; composition faculty are David Del Tredici and Harold Farberman. The permanent faculty includes Maestri Farberman and Leon Botstein (conductor in residence), and Eduardo Navega, director of the Discovery Program. The Institute offers study combinations that enable students to tailor their own programs. Students may enroll in the entire four-week program or one two-week segment of the Conducting Program for Fellows and Colleagues; in two-week programs, including the Discovery Program and the Composer-Conductor Program; or in the one-week program in Visual Score Study/Baton Placement and Body Movement Technique. Visual Score Study/Baton Placement and Body Movement Technique is offered from June 26 to June 30. This program unites the study of Institute repertoire, using visual score study/baton placement techniques, with instruction in the Alexander Technique as it relates directly to the enhancement of performance skills and expression. Maestro Farberman teaches visual score study and baton placement; Alexander Farkas teaches the Alexander Technique. -continued- The Conducting Program for Fellows and Colleagues will be offered from July 3 to July 28. Fellows work with the Institute Orchestra during morning sessions, while Colleagues work with the Institute String Quintet during afternoon sessions and with the Institute Orchestra on Fridays. Repertoire includes Beethoven (Symphony No. 1), Brahms (Tragic Overture, Op. 81), Mahler (Symphony No. 1, “Titan”), Mendelssohn (Symphony No. 4, “Italian”), Mozart (Symphony No. 36, “Linz”), Shostakovich (Symphony No. 5), Strauss (Don Juan, Op. 20), Tchaikovsky (Symphony No. 6, “Pathétique”), and contemporary works by David Del Tredici and Harold Farberman. The Discovery Program, offered from July 10 to July 21, is directed by Eduardo Navega and is designed for conductors with limited experience who wish to improve their basic skills. Participants work with a string quartet in afternoon sessions for two weeks and attend all morning and evening sessions of the Conducting Program. Repertoire includes Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Grieg’s Holberg Suite, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1. As a postlude to the Conducting Program, the Composer-Conductor Program is offered from July 24 to August 4. Composers who want to learn the fundamentals of conducting technique are encouraged to apply. During the first week, composers attend all-morning and evening sessions of the Institute and work in the afternoon on basic techniques, conducting a string quartet (repertoire includes Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Grieg’s Holberg Suite, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1.). In week two, each composer is paired with a conductor in the graduate program who prepares the composer’s work for performance by the Composers’ Chamber Ensemble. The Conductors Institute, in its third decade and its eighth year at Bard College—and now a program of The Bard College Conservatory of Music—also offers a 15-month program leading to a master of music degree in conducting. For two consecutive summers, master’s degree candidates participate in the Institute’s six-week program. During the intervening academic year, candidates complete required course work at Bard, including classes in composition, basic orchestral repertoire, languages, a second instrument (string or piano), and solfège, in addition to master classes in technical score study and analysis with Maestro Farberman. The program also offers podium time, including class sessions with the Institute String Quartet and conducting opportunities with orchestra and chorus during the academic year. It culminates in the second summer with a completion concert with the Institute Orchestra. Scholarship assistance is available for a limited number of qualified applicants. The deadline for application to both the six-week Conductors Institute and the M. Music degree program in conducting is April 1, 2006. Bard College is located in New York’s Hudson River Valley, 90 miles north of New York City and one hour from Tanglewood. For further information and an application, call the Conductors Institute at 845-758-7425, e-mail [email protected], or visit the website, www.bard.edu/ci. # The Faculty Conductor and composer Harold Farberman has written diverse works for orchestra, three operas, numerous chamber works, a score for an Academy Award–winning documentary film, and music for dance companies. Many of his works, which have been performed all over the world, are represented on three Albany Records CDs devoted to his music. An advocate of modern music, Maestro Farberman received the Ives Award for his definitive interpretations of the work of Charles Ives. His recordings of Mahler, Michael Haydn, and Irwin Bazelon, as well as that of Ives and his own music, have earned worldwide recognition for excellence. Farberman founded the Conductors Guild and is the author of a pioneering work, The Art of Conducting Technique: A New Perspective, an innovative approach to the physical placement and movement of the baton. He is also the founder and artistic director of the Conductors Institute and director of Bard’s master of music degree program in conducting. A member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s percussion section from 1951 to 1963, Farberman was its youngest performer when he joined the orchestra immediately after graduating from The Juilliard School of Music. Leon Botstein, conductor in residence, is music director of the American Symphony Orchestra in New York and of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the radio orchestra of Israel. He is also the founder and coartistic director of the Bard Music Festival. Botstein conducted the American staged premiere of Dukas’ opera Ariane et Barbe-bleue at the New York City Opera, and in December conducted Die ägyptische Helena with Deborah Voigt in Madrid. Upcoming engagements include an appearance with the BBC Symphony in London. In spring 2006 he will take the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra on tour in North America. Regular radio broadcasts of Botstein’s concerts with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra may be heard in syndication throughout the United States. His recent recording of Chausson’s opera Le roi Arthus with the BBC Symphony for Telarc has been released to rave reviews. Other acclaimed recordings include two discs with the American Symphony Orchestra: music by Copland, Sessions, Perle, and Rands for New World Records, and music by Ernst von Dohnányi for Bridge Records. Botstein has also conducted on a prestigious series of recordings for Telarc, including Gavriil Popov’s epic Symphony No. 1 and Shostakovich’s Theme and Variations, Op. 3 (just nominated for a 2005 Grammy Award in the category of best orchestral performance); Liszt’s Dante Symphony and Tasso; Glière’s Symphony No. 3, “Il’ya Muromets” (all with the London Symphony); Max Reger’s Böcklin Tone Poems and Romantic Suite; Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra; music of Karol Szymanowski; symphonies of Karl Amadeus Hartmann; Dohnányi’s D Minor Symphony; and Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony, Schalk edition (all with the London Philharmonic). With the American Symphony Orchestra and also for Telarc, he has recorded live performances of two operas by Richard Strauss, Die ägyptische Helena with Deborah Voigt and Die Liebe der Danae with Lauren Flanigan, both of which received great critical acclaim. Botstein’s extensive discography also includes works by Brahms, Schubert, Bruch, and Mendelssohn. A prominent scholar of music history, Botstein is the editor of The Musical Quarterly and the author of numerous articles and books on such diverse topics as music, education, history, and culture. Last year he addressed the United Nations on “Why Music Matters” as part of Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Lecture Series. He is the recipient of the National Arts Club Gold Medal, the Austrian Cross of Honor from the Austrian Cultural Forum, Harvard University’s prestigious Centennial Award, and the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Since 1975 he has been president of Bard College, where he is also Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities. Eduardo Navega, director of the Discovery Program, is a native of Brazil. He began his music studies at an early age in São Paulo. He received his bachelor’s degree in composition and conducting from the University of Campinas and his master’s degree in music from the University of Sheffield. He is currently completing his doctor of musical arts degree in conducting at the Hartt School of Music. He has studied with Benito Juarez, Henrique Gregori, and Harold Farberman. From 1978 to 1989, he was conductor of the University of São Paulo choir. During this time he wrote a number of arrangements of Brazilian popular songs, most of which are still in the repertoire of choirs throughout Brazil. Navega was assistant conductor of the Campinas Symphony Orchestra and an assistant professor of choral and orchestral conducting at the University of Campinas. From 1992 to 1993, he was the conductor of the University of Sheffield Chamber Orchestra and received public and critical acclaim for his performances. Navega was named Up-and-Coming Conductor of the Year in 1995 by the APCA, a prestigious critics association in the state of São Paulo. He is a visiting assistant professor and director of orchestral activities at Vassar College. Visiting Maestri Marin Alsop recently made history with her appointment as music director of the Baltimore Symphony beginning in the 2007–2008 season. She will be the first woman to head a major American orchestra, which mirrors her ongoing success in the United Kingdom as principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony since 2002. Alsop has also just been named a 2005 MacArthur Fellow, the first conductor ever to receive this most prestigious American award. The first artist to win Gramophone’s “Artist of the Year” award and the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Conductor’s Award in the same season, Alsop recently received the Classical Brit Award for Best Female Artist of 2005. She is a regular guest conductor with the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, and Los Angeles Philharmonic and is one of the few conductors to appear every season with both the London Symphony and the London Philharmonic orchestras. Alsop is guest conductor with many other distinguished orchestras worldwide, including the Orchestre de Paris, Bavarian Radio Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, and Tokyo Philharmonic. Her 2005–2006 season includes debuts with the Royal Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Gurzenich Cologne, Tonhalle Zurich, and Boston Symphony. After a highly successful 12-year tenure as music director of the Colorado Symphony, Alsop continues her association with that orchestra as conductor laureate; she also continues in her 14th season as music director of the highly acclaimed Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in California. A native of New York City, Alsop attended Yale University and received her master’s degree from The Juilliard School of Music. In 1989 her conducting career was launched when she was a prizewinner at the Leopold Stokowski International Conducting Competition in New York and was awarded the Koussevitzky Conducting Prize at the Tanglewood Music Center, where she was a pupil of Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, and Gustav Meier. Guillermo Figueroa is a member of one of Puerto Rico’s most distinguished musical families. “An instinctive musical aristocrat, he gives a polished turn to every phrase,” writes Joanne Sheehy Hoover in the Albuquerque Journal. Both a conductor and violinist, Figueroa is the director of the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra; in 2001, he was also named the 10th music director of the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, becoming the first Puerto Rican–born conductor to lead an important orchestra in the United States. In 1994, he made his Lincoln Center conducting debut with the New York City Ballet, where he was also the concertmaster for 10 years, appearing in more than a hundred performances of violin concerti by Stravinsky, Berg, Prokofiev, Brahms, Barber, Adams, and Glass. In his dual role as soloist and conductor, he has appeared with the Kansas City, Colorado, and Iceland symphonies. He has been a guest conductor of the New Jersey, Memphis, and El Salvador symphonies, as well as the Orquesta del Teatro Municipal de Rio de Janeiro, Ballet Memphis, and Ballets de San Juan, and has performed with such distinguished soloists as Itzhak Perlman, Janos Starker, Hilary Hahn, Ruth Laredo, Gary Graffman, Elmar Oliveira, Carol Wincenc, Marcelo Alvarez, Florence Quivar, Pepe Romero, Vladimir Feltsman, Horacio Gutierrez, Barry Douglas, Glen Dicterow, and Paul Neubauer. A founding member of the world-renowned conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Figueroa has served as concertmaster and soloist in acclaimed performances with the orchestra throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. With the New Mexico Symphony, Figueroa has created the most comprehensive Berlioz festival in the United States, this year commemorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of that passionate musician. Committed to the music of his native Puerto Rico, Figueroa has given the world premiere of works by such composers as Ernesto Cordero, Raymond Torres, Carlos Vazquez, Mariano Morales, and Roberto Sierra, the composer-in-residence at the Philadelphia Orchestra. Figueroa began violin studies with his father, Guillermo, and later with his uncle, José, at the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico, where he also worked with Pablo Casals. He attended The Juilliard School of Music, where his teachers were Oscar Shumsky and Felix Galimar. His conducting studies were with Harold Farberman in New York. With an immediately noticeable style that has been described as “elegant, but suffused with energy,” Raymond Harvey has garnered critical acclaim on symphonic podiums throughout the United States. Harvey has been called “one of a welcome new breed of . . . conductors currently enriching our national musical scene,” and is in his fifth season as music director of the Kalamazoo Symphony. He has also been music director of the Fresno Philharmonic and the Springfield Symphony, and associate conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic. He has appeared as guest conductor with many of the country’s leading orchestras, including Philadelphia, Atlanta, St. Louis, Utah, Indianapolis, Rochester, Buffalo, Detroit, Louisville, New Orleans, and San Antonio, as well as the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts and the Boston Pops. Equally at home in the world of opera, Harvey serves as music director of the El Paso Opera and has conducted the company’s productions of Tosca, Carmen, Madama Butterfly, Don Giovanni, La Bohème, and Aida. An excellent pianist and accomplished choral conductor, Harvey holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and a doctor of musical arts degree from the Yale School of Music. He has been featured in Ebony and Symphony magazines, and is profiled in Antoinette Handy’s book Black Conductors. Apo Hsu “generates electricity from the podium in two directions: into the orchestra and into the audience,” according to the Oregonian. This year marks her second season as orchestra director at the National Taiwan Normal University. She also made homecoming guest appearances with the National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra at its 58th anniversary celebration concert and spring concert, the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, and Taipei’s Festival Orchestra. This season marks her debut with the Kaohsiung City Symphony Orchestra in Taiwan as well as the Sung Nam and Prime Philharmonic Orchestras in Seoul, Korea. Hsu recently completed her eighth and final season as the music director and conductor of the Springfield Symphony in Missouri. Previously, she served as artistic director of the Women’s Philharmonic in San Francisco and as music director and conductor of the Oregon Mozart Players in Eugene, after completing a three-year tenure as affiliate artist/NEA assistant conductor of the Oregon Symphony. In September 2001 Avon Women in Concert presented Hsu on tour in Brazil with the Women’s Philharmonic; in the spring of 2000 producer Debbie Allen included Hsu with the Women’s Philharmonic in a series entitled “Cool Women,” which was broadcast on cable television. Hsu and the Women’s Philharmonic recorded their first CD together featuring the symphonic music of African American composer Florence Price, released on the Koch International Classics label. Hsu and the Women’s Philharmonic received four consecutive Awards for Adventurous Programming from ASCAP and the American Symphony Orchestra League. Guest appearances take Hsu all over the United States as well as Russia and the Far East. She has served on the faculty of both the American Symphony Orchestra League Conducting Workshops and National Youth Orchestra Festival 2000. Sidney Rothstein, who is known for his expertise in audience development and programming for orchestras, is in his 29th season as music director of the Reading Symphony Orchestra (Pennsylvania) and his tenth at the Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra (Connecticut). A native of Pennsylvania, he began his career as music director of the Orchestra Society of Philadelphia, conducting Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, broadcast on National Public Radio, during Philadelphia’s bicentennial celebration. Rothstein has also served as music director of the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra and the Florida Symphony Orchestra, and as associate conductor of the Honolulu Symphony. He taught conducting at the New School of Music in Philadelphia, then under the direction of Max Aronoff. Composers in Residence David Del Tredici is generally recognized as the father of the Neo-Romantic movement in music. His music has been commissioned and performed by nearly every major American and European orchestral ensemble. Best-selling recordings were made of both Final Alice and In Memory of a Summer Day (Part I of Child Alice); for the latter work Del Tredici was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1980. Del Tredici’s CD, Secret Music (CRI), was hailed by New Yorker critic Alex Ross, Fanfare’s Robert Carl and critic-at-large Jason Serinus as one of the best new-music albums of the year 2001. His other compositional honors include Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson fellowships, the Brandeis and Friedheim Awards, grants from the NEA, and election to The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently sits on the Boards of Directors of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music and is Distinguished Professor of Music at the City College of New York. Born in 1937, Del Tredici began piano studies at the relatively late age of 12 and studied principally with Bernhard Abramowitsch and, later, Robert Helps. At 17, Del Tredici made his recital debut (“one of the decade’s most impressive debuts,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle), and major orchestral engagements quickly followed. He went on to receive his B.A. (and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa) at the University of California at Berkeley and earned an M.F.A. in 1964 from Princeton University. His composition teachers have included composers Earl Kim, Seymour Shifrin, and Roger Sessions. Harold Farberman (see biography under faculty listing above). # # # (12/6/05)

This event was last updated on 04-04-2006

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