Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (PRWEB) April 24, 2012
Described by the New York Times as part boot camp for the brain, part spa for the spirit, the world-renowned Bard Music Festival in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, returns for its 23rd annual season, filling the last two weekends of Bard SummerScape 2012 with a compelling and enlightening investigation of Saint-Sa?ns and His World. Twelve concert programs over the two mid-August weekends, complemented by pre-concert lectures, panel discussions, and expert commentary, make up Bards examination of Camille Saint-Sa?ns (1835-1921), whose long and remarkable career spanned and helped shape the course of French music from Gounod to Ravel. The twelve concerts offer an immersion in the music of Belle ?poque France, with its trademark opulence and emotional richness, presenting masterpieces from all genres of Saint-Sa?nss prodigious oeuvre, including a rare concert performance of his grand opera Henry VIII, alongside a wealth of music from contemporaries and compatriots. Weekend 1 Paris and the Culture of Cosmopolitanism (August 1012) situates Saint-Sa?ns within his native city, which, as the new musical capital of Europe, was attracting a young generation of composers from abroad. Weekend 2 Confronting Modernism (August 1719) explores the ways the French late-Romantics set the stage for modernisms subsequent upheavals. Together, Bards offerings present a vivid portrait of a dazzlingly creative and colorful era in European history: a Golden Age of promise and possibility that came to an end with the tragedy of World War I.
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 musics major composers, offering a rich web of context for a full appreciation of that composers inspirations and significance. The resident American Symphony Orchestra, integral to the Bard Music Festival from the first, celebrates its half-centenary in the coming season, with the 2012 music festival taking place on the eve of the orchestras 50th anniversary. Leon Botstein, co-artistic director of the festival and soon to begin his 20th season as music director of the American Symphony, will conduct all three orchestral programs at the beautiful Frank Gehry-designed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on Bards glorious Hudson Valley campus. As in previous seasons, choral programs will feature the Bard Festival Chorale directed by James Bagwell, while this years impressive roster of performers includes cellists Edward Arron, Zuill Bailey, and Sophie Shao; violinists Miranda Cuckson, Eugene Drucker, and Giora Schmidt; sopranos Ellie Dehn and Lori Guilbeau; the Horszowski Trio; pianists Anna Polonsky, Gilles Vonsattel, and Orion Weiss; and mezzo-soprano Rebecca Ringel.
With its recognized gift for thematic programming, Bard achieves a unique depth and breadth of musical and cultural discovery. A wide range of Saint-Sa?nss own music will be performed, from popular and canonical works like the Carnival of the Animals and the Organ Symphony to such bona fide rarities as Henry VIII, the late solo sonatas for oboe and bassoon, and his finest choral work: the biblical oratorio Le d?luge (The Flood). Bard also presents a rich and illuminating array of music by Saint-Sa?nss contemporaries, who range from luminaries like his close friend and most famous student, Gabriel Faur?, to lesser-known figures like C?cile Chaminade. Works by foreign-born composers, including Franz Liszt, Pablo de Sarasate, and Igor Stravinsky, reflect Pariss eclipse of Vienna as Europes musical center by the late 1800s.
From his childhood as a prodigy dubbed the French Mozart, Saint-Sa?ns was a consummate and exceptionally versatile musician. His vast compositional output reflects his virtuosity on piano and organ, and, in its advanced chromaticism, his championship of Wagner and Liszt. Yet the clean, almost classical transparency of his music and the brilliancy of his orchestration are unmistakably French. After Saint-Sa?nss death, the critical consensus was initially harsh, dismissing him as lacking even while recognizing his craftsmanship as second to none. Yet, as onetime New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg explained, Saint-Sa?ns is due for a reassessment. A turn of the wheel might find his kind of consummate craft, and his lightweight but elegant and clear-cut musical ideas, worthy of revival.
Bards twelve musical programs, built thematically and spaced over two August weekends, open with the first of three all-Saint-Sa?ns events:
Program 1, Saint-Sa?ns and the Cultivation of Taste, an intimate chamber evening offering fresh hearings of some of his best-loved works. Already familiar as an orchestral tone poem, here the haunting Danse macabre (Dance of Death) is presented in its original incarnation for baritone and piano. Likewise Africa, Saint-Sa?nss travel-inspired piano fantasy, is heard without orchestral accompaniment, training attention on its fine balance of local color with lyrical and rhythmic richness. The Wedding Cake Waltz captures in microcosm the economy of his concertante style, while the Schumannesque First Trio and the Quartet for Piano and Strings in B-flat, which deftly blends Classical and Romantic elements, are two of Saint-Sa?nss finest chamber works.
Program 2 Performing, Composing, and Arranging for Concert Life cuts a wider swath, contextualizing the composer within the Parisian musical world of his day. A prolific adapter, Saint-Sa?nss transcriptions and arrangements of works by Gluck, Mozart, Chopin, and Bizet complement his own First Cello Sonata. It was also Bizet whose Carmen provided the inspiration for the Concert Fantasies of virtuoso violinist Pablo de Sarasate, Saint-Sa?nss friend, fellow performer, and dedicatee of his runaway success, the Spanish-inflected Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. Selections from Franz Liszt, who would become one of the French composers closest friends, his fellow piano prodigy Louis-Moreau Gottschalk, and others of their Parisian circle help complete this evocative snapshot of the age.
Charles Gounod dubbed Saint-Sa?ns the French Beethoven, in recognition of the younger composers achievement in bringing symphonic music into the French cultural mainstream. Program 3 Saint-Sa?ns, a French Beethoven? offers an all-Saint-Sa?ns orchestral tour-de-force. The concert opens with his Haydnesque Symphony in A, which premiered when the composer was only eighteen, prompting an admiring Berlioz to quip: He knows everything, but lacks inexperience, and closes with the monumental and enduringly popular Organ Symphony, which paid homage to Saint-Sa?nss friend and mentor Liszt. Interspersed between are three of his most important contributions to the orchestral repertory. His symphonic poem Le rouet dOmphale (Omphales Spinning Wheel) helped pioneer Liszts new art form in France, while La muse et le po?te (The Muse and the Poet) demonstrates the inimitable luminescence and clarity of Saint-Sa?nss mature style. The French composers fifth and final Piano Concerto, the Egyptian, whose bold harmonies anticipate those of Ravel, has remained a critical and popular success since its premiere, when Saint-Sa?ns himself was the soloist.
The composers prowess as a keyboard virtuoso comes into focus in Program 4, The Organ, King of Instruments. It was Saint-Sa?nss ephemeral weekly improvisations in church that inspired Liszt to name him the greatest organist in the world, but fortunately Saint-Sa?ns also left a number of organ works to posterity. Selected examples are programmed alongside those of his compatriots, including Adolphe Adam, Charles Gounod, C?sar Franck, Louis Lef?bure-W?ly (his predecessor as organist at Pariss church of the Madeleine), and Charles-Marie Widor, his successor at the Conservatoire.
One of Saint-Sa?nss most