(ANNANDALE-on-HUDSON, N.Y.) – Eleven concert programs over the two mid-August weekends, complemented by pre-concert lectures, panel discussions, and expert commentary, make up the world-renowned Bard Music Festival’s examination of Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), arguably the most important composer of the 20th century. The eleven concerts filling the last two weekends of Bard SummerScape 2013 with a compelling and enlightening investigation of “Stravinsky and His World” offer an immersion in the worlds Stravinsky straddled, contextualizing him within the musically distinct milieus – all cultural melting pots – that he inhabited.

Weekend 1, “Becoming Stravinsky: From St. Petersburg to Paris” (Aug 9–11), traces the composer’s path from pre-revolutionary Russia to 1920s Paris, scene of the scandalous premiere of The Rite of Spring.

Weekend 2, “Stravinsky Re-invented: From Paris to Los Angeles” (Aug 16– 18), follows Stravinsky to post-war Hollywood, investigating his subsequent shift in style from neoclassicism to serialism. Enriched by a wealth of music from Stravinsky’s contemporaries and compatriots, the festival explores Russia’s profound and far-reaching impact on 20th-century culture, while continuing Bard’s yearlong tenth-anniversary celebrations for the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center, which commence with a month of special performances in April.

With its recognized gift for thematic programming, Bard achieves a unique depth and breadth of musical and cultural discovery. A wide range of Stravinsky’s own music will be performed, from popular and canonical masterworks like The Rite of Spring and the Symphony of Psalms to such comparative rarities as his one-act opera Mavra and his melodrama Perse?phone.

Bard will also present a rich and illuminating array of music by Stravinsky’s contemporaries, ranging from little-known Maximilian Steinberg (Stravinsky’s fellow student) to such leading lights as Claude Debussy and Erik Satie (both members of his close Parisian circle), along with fellow neoclassicists like Paul Hindemith and younger American composers like Elliott Carter.

Stravinsky’s long career spanned two continents and more than two-thirds of the 20th century, bringing him into collaboration with artists from Rimsky-Korsakov and Ravel to T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, and from Picasso, Nijinsky, and Cocteau to Louis B. Mayer. From his apprenticeship years in St. Petersburg to those spent leading the Parisian avant-garde and as an e?migre? in Hollywood, Stravinsky was a master of reinvention.

His stylistic development reflects this protean capacity for change. His early compositions achieved a synthesis of the melodies, sonorities, and rhythmic vitality of his homeland’s folk traditions with a modernist sensibility. Later, when it became politically expedient for him to distance himself from his Russian roots, Stravinsky developed neoclassicism, infusing pastiches of past masters with a subtly contemporary slant. And towards the end of his career, having initially repudiated Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, he came to embrace and put his own stamp upon it.

While remaining a lifelong monarchist who opposed the Bolshevik Revolution, in music Stravinsky could hardly have been a more radical revolutionary. Certainly no 20th-century composer’s legacy is greater; as his friend and fellow composer Erik Satie put it, Stravinsky was “a liberator,” who, “more than anyone else … freed the musical thought of today.”

As the New York Times observes, “Over two decades, 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,” offering a “rich web of context” for a full appreciation of that composer’s inspirations and significance. The resident American Symphony Orchestra, integral to the Bard Music Festival from the first, celebrates its half-centenary this season. Leon Botstein, co-artistic director of the festival and now in his 20th year as music director of the American Symphony, will conduct all three orchestral programs at the beautiful Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on Bard’s glorious Hudson Valley campus. As in previous seasons, choral works will feature the Bard Festival Chorale directed by James Bagwell, and solo and chamber programs will boast an impressive roster of performers.

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

WEEKEND ONE: Becoming Stravinsky: From St. Petersburg to Paris

Friday, August 9

PROGRAM ONE

The 20th Century’s Most Celebrated Composer Sosnoff Theater

7:30 pm Pre-concert Talk

8 pm Performance

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)

Les Noces (1914–17)

Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920, rev. 1947) Symphony of Psalms (1930)

Concerto for Two Pianos (1935)

Abraham and Isaac (1962–63)

Songs

Tickets: $25, 35, 50, 60

Saturday, August 10

PANEL ONE

Who Was Stravinsky? Olin Hall

10 am–noon

Free and open to the public

PROGRAM TWO

The Russian Context

Olin Hall

1 pm Pre-concert Talk 1:30 pm Performance

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)

Faun and Shepherdess, Op. 2 (1906–07)

Four Studies, for piano, Op. 7 (1908)

Three Movements from Petrushka, for piano solo (1921)

Mikhail Glinka (1804–57)

Trio pathe?tique in D minor (1832)

Alexander Glazunov (1865–1936)

Five Novelettes, for string quartet, Op. 15 (1886)

??

The 24th annual Bard Music Festival: “Stravinsky and His World” Page 8 of 12

Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915) Vers la flamme, Op. 72 (1914)

Sergey Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) Preludes, Op. 23, Nos. 8 & 9 (1901–03)

Songs and piano works by Modest Mussorgsky (1839–81), Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840–93), Nikolai Medtner (1880–1952), and Mikhail Gnesin (1883–1957)

Tickets: $35

PROGRAM THREE

1913: Breakthrough to Fame and Notoriety

Sosnoff Theater

7 pm Pre-concert Talk

8 pm Performance: American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music

director

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) Fireworks (1908)

The Rite of Spring (1913)

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908)

Suite from The Invisible City of Kitezh (c. 1907)

Anatoly Liadov (1855–1914)

From the Apocalypse, Op. 66 (1910–12)

Maximilian Steinberg (1883–1946) Metamorphosen, Op. 10 (1913)

Tickets: $30, 50, 60, 75

Sunday, August 11

PANEL TWO

The Ballets Russes and Beyond: Stravinsky and Dance Olin Hall

10 am–noon

Free and open to the public

PROGRAM FOUR Modernist Conversations

Olin Hall

1 pm Pre-concert Talk 1:30 pm Performance

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) Three Japanese Lyrics (1912) Pribaoutki (1914)

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

 

The 24th annual Bard Music Festival: “Stravinsky and His World”

En blanc et noir (1915)

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951)

Pierrot lunaire (1912) Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)

Trois poemes de Stephane Mallarme (1913) Manuel de Falla (1876–1946)

Pour le tombeau de Claude Debussy (1920) Maurice Delage (1879–1961)

Quatre poemes hindous (1912–13)

Works by Erik Satie (1866-1925); Manuel de Falla (1876-1946); and Bela Bartok (1881-1945)

Tickets: $35

PROGRAM FIVE

Sight and Sound: From Abstraction to Surrealism

Sosnoff Theater

5 pm Pre-concert Talk 5:30 pm Performance

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) Ragtime (1918)

Mavra (1921–22)

Erik Satie (1866–1925)

Parade (1916–17; arr. piano four-hands)

Francis Poulenc (1899–1963)

Le travail du peintre, song cycle for voice and piano, Op. 161 (1956)

Georges Auric (1899–1983), Arthur Honegger (1892–1955), Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983)

Les maries de la tour Eiffel (1921) Works by Andre Souris (1899–1970)

Tickets: $25, 35, 50, 60

WEEKEND TWO: Stravinsky Re-invented: From Paris to Los Angeles Friday, August 16

PROGRAM SIX

Against Interpretation and Expression: The Aesthetics of Mechanization

Sosnoff Theater

7:30 pm Pre-concert Talk 8 pm Performance

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)

 

The 24th annual Bard Music Festival: “Stravinsky and His World”

Concerto for Piano and Winds (1923–24)

Sonata for Two Pianos (1943–44) Bela Bartok (1881–1945)

Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, Sz 110 (1937) Edgard Varese (1883–1965)

Octandre (1923)

Paul Hindemith (1895–1963)

Kleine Kammermusik, Op. 24, No. 2 (1922) Olivier Messiaen (1908–92)

From Quatre etudes de rythme (1949–50) Tickets: $25, 35, 50, 60

Saturday, August 17

PANEL THREE

Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini: Music, Ethics, and Politics Olin Hall

10 am—noon

Free and open to the public

PROGRAM SEVEN Stravinsky in Paris

Olin Hall

1 pm Pre-concert Talk 1:30 pm Performance

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)

Les cinq doigts, for piano (1921) Octet for Wind Instruments (1922–23) Duo Concertant (1931–32)

Albert Roussel (1869–1937)

Serenade, for flute, harp, and string trio, Op. 30 (1925)

Bohuslav Martinu (1890–1959) String Quartet No. 4, H. 256 (1937)

Sergey Prokofiev (1891–1953)

Sonata for Two Violins, Op. 56 (1932)

Alexandre Tansman (1897–1986) Sonatina for Flute and Piano (1925)

Tickets: $35

PROGRAM EIGHT

The Emigre in America

Sosnoff Theater

7 pm Pre-concert Talk

8 pm Performance: American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music

director

 

The 24th annual Bard Music Festival: “Stravinsky and His World”

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)

Jeu de cartes (1936)

Symphony in Three Movements (1942–45) Ode (1943)

Requiem Canticles (1965–66)

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) Kol Nidre, Op. 39 (1938)

Works by Hanns Eisler (1898–1962) Tickets: $30, 50, 60, 75

Sunday, August 18

PROGRAM NINE

Stravinsky, Spirituality, and the Choral Tradition Olin Hall

10 am Performance with commentary

Choral works by Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971); Gesualdo da Venosa (1566–1613), Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643); Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750); Sergey Rachmaninoff (1873–1943); Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), Lili Boulanger (1893-1918), and Ernst Krenek (1900-91)

Tickets: $30

PROGRAM TEN

The Poetics of Music and After Olin Hall

1 pm Pre-concert Talk 1:30 pm Performance

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)

Circus Polka, arranged for piano (1942, arr. 1944) Septet (1952–53)

Anton Webern (1883–1945) Variations for Piano, Op. 27 (1936)

Walter Piston (1894–1976)

Suite, for oboe and piano (1931)

Aaron Copland (1900–90) Nonet (1960)

Elliott Carter (1908–2012) Woodwind Quintet (1948)

Ellis B. Kohs (1916–2000)

Sonatina for Violin and Piano (1948)

Carlos Chavez (1899–1978) Fugas (1942)

Tickets: $35

 

The 24th annual Bard Music Festival: “Stravinsky and His World”
PROGRAM ELEVEN

The Classical Heritage

Sosnoff Theater

3:30 pm Pre-concert Talk

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

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) Persephone (1933–34, rev. 1948) Oedipus Rex (1926–27, rev. 1948)

Tickets: $30, 50, 60, 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.

Bard SummerScape: fishercenter.bard.edu/summerscape/2013

Bard Music Festival: fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf/2013

Tickets: fishercenter@bard.edu; or by phone at 845-758-7900

Updates: Bard’s “e-members” get all the news in regular updates. Click here to sign up, or send an e-mail to fishercenter@bard.edu.

All program information is subject to change.

The 24th annual Bard Music Festival 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 National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.