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Bard Conservatory of Music Presents Student and Faculty Showcase Weekend, Two Free, Live-Streamed Concerts October 24-25, including Performances by Celebrated Violinists and New Faculty Gil Shaham and Adele Anthony

Concerts will Feature the World Premiere of Artist in Residence Erica Lindsay’s Adagio for String Orchestra (2020) and Works by Casals, Vivaldi, Mozart, Mahler, and Elgar

October 24 Event Will Honor Cellist and Faculty Member Luis Garcia-Renart (1936–2020)

The Bard College Conservatory of Music presents a student and faculty showcase weekend, October 24–25, two free, live-streamed concerts featuring the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra, Leon Botstein, conductor, showcasing performances by celebrated violinists and new Conservatory faculty Gil Shaham and Adele Anthony, as well as students and other faculty from the Bard Music Program, Conservatory, and The Orchestra Now. The October 24 concert, at 7:30 p.m., is in honor of cellist and faculty member Luis Garcia-Renart (1936–2020), and features the world premiere of Artist in Residence Erica Lindsay’s Adagio for String Orchestra (2020), as well as works by Casals and Vivaldi. Garcia-Renart, who taught at Bard from 1962 until his death earlier this year, was a former student of Casals. The October 25 concert, at 3 p.m., includes performances of works by Mozart, Mahler, and Elgar. Both concerts are free and will be live streamed from the Fisher Center at Bard’s Sosnoff Theater. Reservations are required. Proceeds support the Conservatory Scholarship Fund. For more information, visit fishercenter.bard.edu.

October 24 at 7:30 p.m.
Bard College Conservatory Orchestra Leon Botstein, Music Director
Concert in honor of cellist and faculty member Luis Garcia-Renart (1936–2020)

Pablo Casals
“The Song of the Birds” (El cant dels Ocells)

La Sardana, Cello choir with faculty members Peter Wiley and Raman Ramakrishnan and cellists from the Conservatory, The Orchestra Now, and the Music Program

Erica Lindsay
Adagio World Premiere
Conservatory Orchestra with Erica Kiesewetter, conductor

Antonio Vivaldi
The Four Seasons
Conservatory Orchestra
with faculty soloists Gil Shaham and Adele Anthony, violinsOctober 25 at 3 p.m.
Bard College Conservatory Orchestra Leon Botstein, Music Director

W. A. Mozart
Serenade No. 6 in D Major, KV 239 “Serenata notturna”

Gustav Mahler
Adagietto from Symphony No. 5

Edward Elgar (1857–1934)
Introduction and Allegro, for string quartet and string orchestra in G Major, Op.47


BARD COLLEGE CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC

Tan Dun, Dean

Frank Corliss, Director

Marka Gustavsson, Associate Director

The Bard College Conservatory of Music expands Bard’s spirit of innovation in arts and education. The Conservatory, which opened in 2005, offers a five-year, double-degree program at the undergraduate level and, at the graduate level, programs in vocal arts and conducting. At the graduate level the Conservatory also offers an Advanced Performance Studies program and a two-year Postgraduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship. The US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, established in 2017, offers a unique degree program in Chinese instruments.

For more information, see bard.edu/conservatory.
 
(10.08.20)

 

Post Date: 10-08-2020

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Bard Conservatory Featured in Now Hear This “The Schubert Generation” on PBS, with Performances by Ryan McCullough and Lucy Fitz Gibbon MM ’15

“Teaching is how I learn,” pianist Ryan McCullough tells host Scott Yoo. “I've studied with wonderful teachers in the past, but no one is ever done learning. And by teaching someone else what you love doing, you are teaching yourself what you care about.” Watch McCullough—a postgraduate collaborative piano fellow in the Conservatory—and Yoo discuss the importance of teaching to Scubert’s development as an artist. Then listen to McCullough play the fourth movement of Franz Schubert’s piano sonata No. 19 before being joined by soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon MM ’15—alumna and faculty member of the Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program—for the song “Suleika.” (Segment begins at 17:30)

Post Date: 10-06-2020

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Glenn Alexander GCP ’20 has received a Project Inclusion Conducting Freeman Fellowship from the Chicago Sinfonietta

A native of Port Arthur, Texas, Alexander holds a bachelor of music degree in piano from Prairie View A&M University and a master of music degree in orchestral conducting from the Bard Conservatory of Music. He is currently pursuing a professional studies certificate in orchestral conduction from the Manhattan School of Music. The Project Inclusion Conducting Freeman Fellowship fosters the development of four to six conductors of diverse backgrounds who are on the verge of professional careers.

Post Date: 09-25-2020

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Bard Conservatory Students Sophia Jackson ’25 and Aleksandar Vitanov ’25 Launch Music Mentorship Initiative

First-year instrumentalists Sophia Jackson, cello, and Aleksandar Vitanov, trumpet, have launched a new program called the Music Mentorship Initiative (MMI). The program offers tutoring and free private lessons to music students who otherwise cannot afford them, while allowing mentors—current Conservatory students who have completed a pedagogical training seminar—to gain teaching experience.
Become a Mentee

Post Date: 09-20-2020

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Peter Serkin Tribute: Live from Music Mountain and Carnegie Hall Copresent Program Honoring the Distinguished Pianist and Bard Conservatory Faculty Member

On Sunday, September 13, Live From Music Mountain, in partnership with Carnegie Hall, presented a special tribute to renowned pianist Peter Serkin, who taught at the Bard College Conservatory of Music from the time the program was established in 2005 until his death in February 2020. The special two-hour program, which was streamed on multiple platforms, included highlights of performances by Serkin and conversations with artists who were close to him, including Emanuel Ax, Jaime Laredo, Jeremy Denk, and Benjamin Hochman; Fred Sherry, Ida Kavafian, and Richard Stoltzman, cofounders with Serkin of the Tashi Quartet; producer Marty Krystall; Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt of the Dover Quartet; composers Derek Bermel and Andreia Pinto-Correia; and former student Tomoki Park.

Post Date: 09-16-2020

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Bard Music Festival Presents “Out of the Silence: A Celebration of Music”: Four Free Livestreamed Concerts Showcasing Black Composers and Subjects of Past Festivals, with The Orchestra Now & Bard College Conservatory Faculty, Sept. 5-26

Next month, the Bard Music Festival joins forces with The Orchestra Now (TŌN) and the Bard College Conservatory to present “Out of the Silence: A Celebration of Music,” a series of four free livestreamed concerts for string orchestra, piano and percussion (Sept. 5–26), coming to UPSTREAMING, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage. All programs are free, reservations requested. Pairing works by Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, and Bartók—all past subjects of the Bard Music Festival—with music by 10 prominent Black composers, ranging from classical pioneer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, to contemporary Americans Alvin Singleton, Adolphus Hailstork, and Jessie Montgomery, the series celebrates Bard’s commitment to neglected rarities and the unquenchable joy of music making. All four programs will be performed without an audience and with appropriate safety measures on Bard College’s idyllic Hudson Valley campus by its unique graduate training orchestra, TŌN, under the leadership of Music Director Leon Botstein and other members of the TŌN artistic team. Hailed as “a highlight of the musical year” (Wall Street Journal), the Bard Music Festival is the inspiration for Bard’s annual seven-week SummerScape festival, whose devoted fans will no doubt enjoy the chance to experience virtually some of the adventurous Bard music-making they have been missing. Click here to hear Botstein and TŌN perform William Grant Still's Symphony No. 1, “Afro-American.”

Since its founding in 1990, the Bard Music Festival has succeeded in enriching the standard concert repertory with a wealth of important rediscoveries; as the New York Times points out, “wherever there is an overlooked potential masterpiece, Leon Botstein is not too far behind.” True to this mission, “Out of the Silence” shines a light on some of the important Black composers so rarely admitted to the canon. Examples of their work will be heard in September alongside music by four composers featured in early seasons of the festival. By celebrating more than three decades of musical exploration at Bard while amplifying some of society’s most unjustly neglected artistic voices, the series looks ahead to a more equitable future.

The Founder and Co-Artistic Director of the Bard Music Festival, the President of Bard College, and “one of the most remarkable figures in the worlds of arts and culture” (THIRTEEN/WNET), Botstein explains:

“These concerts are an affirmation of Bard’s commitment to the centrality of music in our public culture. The series takes its title from the opening work on this series, by William Grant Still. Out of the Silence therefore carries two meanings: the return of music to the public stage after months of silence, and the foregrounding of music too long kept in the shadows, music by Black composers who have never gotten their proper due on the concert stages of the world. As the performance of music begins anew, Bard will pioneer, as it has in the past, on behalf of those composers and works of music left, unjustly, in obscurity.”

It was Botstein who founded TŌN five years ago, to help make orchestral music relevant to 21st-century audiences. He leads the orchestra in all four programs of “Out of the Silence,” which also features appearances by TŌN’s Academic Director and Associate Conductor James Bagwell, Resident Conductor Zachary Schwartzman and Assistant Conductor Andrés Rivas. Keyboard faculty from the Bard Conservatory of Music will join TŌN for several performances.

“Out of the Silence”
“Out of the Silence” opens with two works by the great William Grant Still. The first African-American to have a symphony performed by a major U.S. orchestra, and the subject of a 2009 retrospective curated and conducted by Botstein at Lincoln Center, Still is represented by his meditative miniature Out of the Silence from Seven Traceries, and the evocative tone poem Serenade. Had Bard not been forced to postpone its regular summer season, this year’s attendees would have enjoyed a festival devoted to “Nadia Boulanger and Her World” (now scheduled for summer 2021). It is fitting, then, that Program One (September 5) features a piece by one of the French composer’s many distinguished students: the elegiac Lyric for Strings by George Walker, the first African-American winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music and “one of the greatest composers of our time” (Fanfare magazine). The concert concludes with TŌN’s account of the exuberant String Symphony No. 8 by Felix Mendelssohn, subject of the Bard Music Festival’s second season in 1991.

Program Two (September 12) offers a snapshot of contemporary music with works by three of today’s most compelling Black composers. A former composer-in-residence of both the Atlanta and Detroit Symphonies, Alvin Singleton is blessed with a “unique musical vision” (ArtsATL), while Adolphus Hailstork, another Boulanger student, has accrued a string of honors including Cultural Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia and Distinguished Alumni Award from Manhattan School of Music. Both men were born in the early 1940s, four decades before Jessie Montgomery. “Turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (Washington Post), Montgomery’s music has been recognized with the ASCAP Foundation’s Leonard Bernstein Award, and her current commissions include works for the New York Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall. Their compositions share the program with the Serenade for Strings by Antonín Dvořák, subject of the 1993 Bard Music Festival, who championed African-American and Native American music as the foundation for a homegrown U.S. musical style.

After opening with the Adagio trágico by Roque Cordero, who infused twelve-tone writing with the folk rhythms of his native Panama, Program Three (September 19) presents a pair of longer works. In his Four Novelettes, Anglo-African late-Romantic composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor demonstrates graceful lyricism with a light, balletic touch that is almost reminiscent of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, subject of the festival’s 1998 season, whose soulful Serenade for Strings concludes the concert.

The centerpiece of Program Four (September 26) is the Violin Concerto in G by Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Violin soloist Ashley Horne, a member of both the American Symphony Orchestra and the Harlem Chamber Players, can also be seen in Le Mozart noir, a PBS documentary about the composer’s life. The son of a slave and a planter in French Guadeloupe, Chevalier de Saint-Georges was not only the first known classical composer of African ancestry, but also an accomplished violinist, champion fencer and colonel of the first all-Black military regiment in Europe. Bookending his concerto are orchestral arrangements of Solitude and Sophisticated Lady, two mid-century masterpieces by the inimitable Duke Ellington, and the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta by Béla Bartók, subject of the 1995 festival.

The Orchestra Now (TŌN)
The Orchestra Now (TŌN) is a unique graduate training ensemble designed to help make orchestral music relevant to 21st-century audiences. Hand-picked from the world’s leading conservatories, including the Curtis Institute of Music, Juilliard School, Royal Conservatory of Brussels and Shanghai Conservatory of Music, its young members share their insights through on-stage introductions and demonstrations, program notes written from a musician’s perspective, and one-on-one intermission chats with patrons. In regular seasons, as well as giving a concert series at Bard’s Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center, TŌN performs at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other key venues in New York City and beyond.Fishercenter.bard.edu
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Bard Music Festival presents “Out of the Silence: A Celebration of Music”

Streaming live from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY,
at UPSTREAMING, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage

PROGRAM ONE
Sat, Sep 5 at 5:30pm
The Orchestra Now, conducted by Leon Botstein and James Bagwell
William Grant Still (1895–1978): Out of the Silence, from Seven Traceries (1939)
William Grant Still (1895–1978): Serenade (1957)
George Walker (1922–2018): Lyric for Strings (1946)
Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47): String Symphony No. 8 in D (1822)

PROGRAM TWO
Sat, Sep 12 at 5:30pm
The Orchestra Now, conducted by Leon Botstein, James Bagwell, Andrés Rivas & Zachary Schwartzman
Jessie Montgomery (b. 1981): Strum (2018)
Alvin Singleton (b. 1940): After Choice (2009)
Adolphus Hailstork (b. 1941): Sonata da Chiesa (1990)
Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904): Serenade for Strings, Op. 22 (1875)

PROGRAM THREE
Sat, Sep 19 at 5:30pm
The Orchestra Now, conducted by Leon Botstein, Andrés Rivas and Zachary Schwartzman
Roque Cordero (1917–2008): Adagio trágico (1972)
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912): Four Novelettes, Op. 52 (1903)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93): Serenade for Strings, Op. 48 (1880)

PROGRAM FOUR
Sat, Sep 26 at 5:30pm
The Orchestra Now, conducted by Leon Botstein
Duke Ellington (1899–1974): Solitude (1941; arr. Gould)
Duke Ellington (1899–1974): Sophisticated Lady (1932; arr. Gould)
Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745–99): Violin Concerto in G, Op. 2, No. 1 (1773)
   (with Ashley Horne, violin)
Béla Bartók: Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936)

All programs are subject to change.
 

Post Date: 08-24-2020