Readers may recall that this past Sunday this site reported that the nine concert programs to be performed at the Music@Menlo 2021 Summer Festival will all be live-streamed. Yesterday I learned that, on the other side of the country, all twelve of the concerts in this summer’s Bard Music Festival will also be live-streamed. These performances will also take place over the course of two weekends, and the good news is that the Bard Festival will begin after the Music@Menlo Festival has concluded!
The most important difference between the two events, however, is that every year Bard organizes its concerts around a single theme. The title of next month’s Festival will be Nadia Boulanger and Her World. All the performances will take place before a live audience at the Fisher Center on the Bard campus. There will be more variation in scheduling times than there was for Music@Menlo; and (of course) the scheduling was based on Eastern time. So viewing times in California are likely to be at least a bit more eccentric, and all times in this article will be Pacific Daylight. Program specifics are as follows:
Friday, August 6, 2 p.m., The Exemplary Musician: The program will begin with three Boulanger offerings. Pianist Fei-Fei will play “Vers la vie nouvelle” (towards the new life). There will be a selection of songs by several vocalists, followed by “Lux aeterna” (eternal light), composed as a tribute to her sister Lili. Lili herself will be represented on the program by the “Pie Jesu” setting, which she dictated on her deathbed, and her cantata Faust et Hélène (the latter being Helen of Troy). The program will also include works by female composers influenced by Nadia: Louise Talma, Julia Perry, Grażyna Bacewicz, and Priaulx Rainier.
Saturday, August 7, 10 a.m. Contemporaries and Colleagues: Nadia will be represented by her efforts in art song. These will include excerpts from the cycle Les heures claires (the bright hours), which she composed in partnership with Raoul Pugno, along with a selection of her other songs. Lili will also be represented by a set of her own songs. The program will also sample works by composers that influenced her early in her career: Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré (who was her composition teacher), and two of her classmates, George Enescu and Maurice Ravel. The final selection will be by Nadia’s first American pupil, Marion Bauer.
Saturday, August 7, 4 p.m., 88 X 2: Music for 2 Pianos: One element of Nadia’s pedagogy involved requiring her students to sight-read orchestral scores as piano duets. However, this program will begin with her arrangement of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, the opening aria of his BWV 54 cantata Widerstehe doch der Sünde (just resist sin). The remainder of the program will review two-piano performances of music by Johannes Brahms, Emmanuel Chabrier, Igor Stravinsky, Marcelle de Manziarly, Olivier Messiaen, and Jean Françaix.
Sunday, August 8, 10 a.m., The Epitome of Chic: Paris Between the Wars: Nadia will be represented by another set of songs and Lili by her “Cortège,” composed in 1914. The program will also include a passacaglia by Erik Satie, as well as music by two of the “Les Six” composers inspired by him, Germaine Tailleferre and Georges Auric. The other composers on the program will be Pierre Menu, Elsa Barraine, and Albert Roussel.
Sunday, August 8, 2 p.m., Teachers, Mentors, and Friends of the Boulanger Sisters: Lili will be the only sister represented on this program with excerpts from Clairières dans le ciel (the brightness of the sky) and “D’un matin de printemps” (one spring morning). The instrumentation for the remaining selections will be more distinctive. First there will be a performance by Renée Anne Louprette of Charles-Marie Widor’s Opus 69, the third of his symphonies for solo organ. Leon Botstein will then conduct The Orchestra Now in performances of Paul Dukas’ C major symphony and Francis Poulenc’s G minor single-movement concerto for organ, timpani, and strings.
Thursday, August 12, 4 p.m., L’Esprit de Paris (the spirit of Paris): This will be a program of “lighter” French music with vocal excerpts from operettas, comic operas, popular songs, and chansons composed between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.
Friday, August 13, 4 p.m., Crosscurrents: Salon and Concert Hall: Nadia will be represented by the set of three pieces for cello and piano that she completed in 1914. This will be followed by Igor Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto, whose premiere performance was conducted by Boulanger. She will then be represented by her pupil Peggy Glanville-Hicks with a performance of “Prelude for a Pensive Pupil.” The program will also include the second symphony by Arthur Honegger, another “Les Six” composer, and conclude with the United States premiere of Dinu Lipatti’s Opus 3, entitled “Concertino in the Classical Style.”
Saturday, August 14, 10 a.m., Boulanger the Curator: This will be a program primarily of vocal music performed by the Bard Festival Vocal Ensemble and Players conducted by James Bagwell.
Saturday, August 14, 2 p.m., Remembering Ethel Smyth and Boulanger’s Circle at Home and Abroad: Smyth will be represented by her 1923 “Fête galante.” The Boulanger on this program will be Lili with Ransom Wilson’s orchestration of the set of variations on a theme that she completed in 1914. (Wilson’s orchestration was completed earlier this year.) The program will also present two of Nadia’s pupils that would go on to win Pulitzer Prizes, Aaron Copland and Walter Piston. The concluding selection will be the United States premiere of Bacewicz’ fifth violin concerto.
Sunday, August 15, 7 a.m., The Catholic Tradition in France: Clarity and Mysticism: This will be a program of choral and organ works by Nadia and a diversity of other composers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Sunday, August 15, 10 a.m., Boulanger’s Legacy: Modernities: This program will sample the impressive diversity of Boulanger’s students. On the American side Roy Harris, Roger Sessions, and Elliott Carter will be represented along with George Walker, the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Other Americans will include San Francisco composer David Conte and Boulanger’s last pupil, Philip Glass. Perhaps the least expected composer on the program will be Michel Legrand.
Sunday, August 15, 2 p.m., Boulanger’s Credo: Boulanger conducted the New York Philharmonic in 1962. Her program presented the world premiere of Virgil Thomson’s “A Solemn Music” coupled with Fauré’s setting of the Requiem text. Both of these works will be performed on this final concert, preceded by three compositions by Lili.
Each of the above hyperlinks leads to an event page which, in turn, has a hyperlink for live-stream viewing. The price of admission for each live-streamed program will be $10. Those planning to view all twelve concerts can make a single payment of $120 through a single Web page.
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