(ANNANDALE-on-HUDSON, N.Y.) – The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten and the world premiere of Payne Hollow by Shawn Jaeger, with libretto by Wendell Berry, will be staged by the Graduate Vocal Arts Program of the Bard College Conservatory of Music in the Sosnoff Theater of the Fisher Center at Bard College on Friday, March 14, at 7 p.m. and Sunday, March 16, at 2 p.m.
The two professionally staged, one-act operas will be directed by Nicholas Muni; Payne Hollow will be conducted by Carl Christian Bettendorf; and The Turn of the Screw by James Bagwell.
Tickets are $15, $25, $35, and $100 (the latter includes priority seating and an invitation to a special champagne reception on Sunday, March 16, of which $75 is tax deductible). All ticket sales benefit the Conservatory’s scholarship fund. To purchase tickets, call the Fisher Center box office at 845-758-7900 or go to the Fisher Center at Bard College.
Dawn Upshaw, artistic director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program, says, “We are very excited and pleased to present the world premiere of Payne Hollow, a chamber opera with libretto by distinguished Kentucky author Wendell Berry, based on his short verse play Sonata at Payne Hollow, with music written by young American composer Shawn Jaeger.”
Jaeger describes Payne Hollow as “a love story, a ghost story, and a tribute to lives lived in harmony with the land. It celebrates two modern-day Thoreaus — Harlan and Anna Hubbard — who, from 1951 to 1986, lived in solitude and self-sufficiency, without electricity, in a small home they built on the bank of the Ohio River, at Payne Hollow.”
Stage director Nicholas Muni has paired Payne Hollow with another extraordinary work, Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, based on a novella by Henry James. The chamber work tells the tale of the haunting of a country estate by two ghosts and the imagination of a highly strung young woman: are the ghosts real or in her imagination? It is a story about good versus evil, corruption versus innocence, and the supernatural.
The operas will be performed by sopranos Angela Aida Carducci, Elizabeth Cohen, Lucy Fitz Gibbon, Helen Zhibing Huang, Kameryn Lueng, Devony Smith, Laura Soto-Bayomi, and Sarah Tuttle; mezzo-sopranos Katherine Maysek and Sara LeMesh; Vincent Festa, tenor; and Jeremy Hirsch and Michael Hofmann, baritones.
The Conservatory’s Graduate Vocal Arts program produces a fully staged opera program every two years, giving young artists the opportunity to collaborate with theater professionals. Recognized as one of the finest conservatories in the United States, The Bard College Conservatory of Music, founded in 2005, is guided by the principle that musicians should be broadly educated in the liberal arts and sciences to achieve their greatest potential. All undergraduates complete two degrees over a five-year period, a bachelor of music and a bachelor of arts in a field other than music.
For more information about this program and to purchase tickets go to fishercenter.bard.edu, or call 845-758-7900.