2012 SummerScape Season Preview Brochure

SPECIAL SUMMERSCAPE 2012SEASON PREVIEW

Bard SummerScape 2012 presents seven extraordinary weeks of opera, music, theater, dance, cabaret, and film. The season’s focal point is the 23rd annual Bard Music Festival, which this year celebrates the composer Camille Saint-Saëns, whose remarkable career shaped not only the history of music in France, but also the ways in which that history was transmitted and communicated to the public. A generous offering of Saint-Saëns’s work in almost every genre, from symphonies to piano music, will be performed over two weekends of concerts. Another season highlight is The King in Spite of Himself (Le roi malgré lui), an opéra-comique about a reluctant ruler by Saint-Saëns’s contemporary Emmanuel Chabrier. Add to this a French dance company that seamlessly blends the baroque and the contemporary, a production of Molière’s hilarious comedy The Imaginary Invalid, an unusual and provocative film festival, and the lively cabaret and eclectic musical acts of the Spiegeltent, and the sum is a festival like no other—SummerScape 2012.

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the 23rd bard music festivalSaint-Saëns and His World

July 6 – August 19, 2012

The 2012 SummerScape season is made possible in part through the generous support of the Board of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, 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.

Cover: From the opera Die Liebe der Danae, SummerScape 2011. Photo: Cory Weaver

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“ SummerScape at Bard College . . . ever a hotbed of intellectual and aesthetic adventure.”—New York Times

THE SPIEGELTENTOnce again, Bard’s glittering “Mirror Tent” is the stage for a rich array of performers, from dauntless acrobats to bawdy cabaret acts to musicians without boundaries. This summer, in keeping with Saint-Saëns, the honoree of the Bard Music Festival, Spiegeltent programs will be given a French twist, including a Bastille Day Bash on July 14. Before and after performances, enjoy light fare, meals, and drinks selected from the Hudson Valley’s farms, dairies, wineries, and breweries. As a place to meet friends, bring the kids, or relax between shows, the Spiegeltent is hard to top.

FILM FESTIVALThe SummerScape 2012 film festival—“France and the Colonial Imagination”— explores the legacy of French colonialism in Africa and Southeast Asia. A wide range of styles, concerns, and viewpoints is represented by these films, which include romantic treatments of Europeans in the African Muslim world (Pépé le Moko; Casablanca; Beau Travail); works by European filmmakers that confront and challenge colonialism (The Battle of Algiers); works that explore the consequences of colonialism in French life (Caché); and works from the perspective of the colonized, including two films by Senegal’s Ousmane Sembene, considered the “Father of African film.”

The Battle of Algiers, 1937. ©Photofest

AUGUST 10–12 PARIS AND THE CULTURE OF COSMOPOLITANISMThe career of Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) spanned the course of French music from Gounod to Ravel, and his prodigious and stylistically varied output helps to define our understanding of the classical, the romantic, and the modern in music. This first weekend of the Bard Music Festival includes a radical reconsideration of Saint-Saëns’s most famous piece, The Carnival of Animals, and examines the composer’s debt to many of his contemporaries and predecessors. Other featured works will be his Third Symphony, the Piano Concerto No. 4, and a selection of his chamber music.

AUGUST 17–19 CONFRONTING MODERNISMWeekend Two of the Bard Music Festival explores music by many of Saint-Saëns’s contemporaries, including Franck, Chabrier, and Fauré; considers music as seen through the eyes of Marcel Proust; and contemplates exoticism in music and the influence of Wagner. The weekend ends with one of Saint-Saëns’s finest choral works, The Flood, alongside Psalm 130 by Lili Boulanger.

Bard Music Festival weekends include orchestral concerts by the American Symphony Orchestra, chamber and choral music performances, panel discussions, and special events. Tickets from $25 to $75

The 23rd 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.

BARDSUMMERSCAPE 2012danceCOMPAGNIE FÊTES GALANTES Founded in 1993 by Béatrice Massin, Compagnie fêtes galantes elaborates on the many aspects of baroque dance, blending them with contemporary choreography. By avoiding any attempt at reconstitution, fêtes galantes brings forward, in our time, a kind of baroque dancing that engages and appeals to a contemporary sensibility.

SOSNOFF THEATERJuly 6 and 7 at 8 pm July 8 at 3 pm Tickets: $25, 40, 45, 55

theater THE IMAGINARY INVALID (Le malade imaginaire) by Molière

Molière (the pen name of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) was second only to Shakespeare as a master of comedy, and The Imaginary Invalid—his final play—is among his greatest works. The illusory agonies of the wealthy Argan, a housebound hypochondriac who sorely desires to marry his daughter to a doctor, have proved tonic to audiences ever since the play premiered in 1673. This production is directed by Erica Schmidt, whose deft hand guided three previous SummerScape offerings—The Tender Land, The Sorcerer, and Uncle Vanya.

THEATER TWOJuly 13,14,19, 20 and 21 at 8 pmJuly 14,15,18, 21 and 22 at 3 pmTickets: $45

This performance has been generously underwritten by the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation.

opera THE KING IN SPITE OF HIMSELF (Le roi malgré lui) by Emmanuel Chabrier

American Symphony OrchestraConducted by Leon Botstein, music director

This tale of Henri de Valois, a 16th-century French noble elected by the people of Poland to be their king, despite his great reluctance to be away from France, has been much praised for the quality of its music—indeed, no less a masterthan Maurice Ravel claimed that Chabrier’s score changed the course of French harmony. Given a contemporary treament by Thaddeus Strassberger, who also directed Bard SummerScape’s acclaimed productions of Les Huguenots (2009) and The Distant Sound (2010), this staging will be a coproduction with Ireland’s Wexford Festival Opera.

SOSNOFF THEATERJuly 27 and August 3 at 7 pmJuly 29 and August 1, 5 at 3 pmTickets: $30, 60, 70, 90

Call 845-758-7948 for information about premium seating with special benefits.

Special support for this program is provided by Emily H. Fisher and John Alexander.

OPERA TALKSThe Opera Talk for The King in Spite of Himself will take place at 1 pm on Sunday, July 29, in the Sosnoff Theater. The talk is free and open to the public.

Opera Talks are presented in memory of Sylvia Redlick Green.

the twenty-third season BARD MUSIC FESTIVALSAINT-SAËNS AND HIS WORLD

Photo: ©Peter Aaron ’68/Esto

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For complete information and to order tickets fishercenter.bard.edu | 845-758-7900The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing ArtsBard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York