Bard Conservatory of Music News Archive

“Bard College's Graduate Vocal Arts Program produced a lively, delightful and musically assured staging of Leoš Janáček's nonpareil Cunning Little Vixen,” writes David Shengold for Opera News. “Doug Fitch's handsome, inventive production and James Bagwell's assured musical direction demonstrated their understanding of this very particular—even peculiar—piece. [...] Bagwell led the youthful Orchestra Now with considerable grace.”

Bard Vocal Arts alum Aiden K. Feltkamp ’16 wants to help transgender and nonbinary people have their voices heard. Anthology of New Music: Trans & Nonbinary Voices, curated by Feltkamp, is thought to be the first compiled volume of songs written for and/or by transgender and nonbinary people. “It’s been in my brain for a long time,” said Feltkamp of the collection. “I really, really love art song, but so much of it was so gendered and I found that it was really hard to connect to it for that reason. Because it was either you had to sing this very feminine music about being a woman or it was this music that . . . was still very much about being a man in the world in the 18th century or whatever.” The compositions featured in the anthology are from 2007 to 2019. “It's really a starting place as a singer to find repertoire, and as a teacher it’s also a place to find things to suggest to students, to teach to students,” says Feltkamp.

The Bard College Conservatory of Music presents Salome, an opera by Richard Strauss with libretto by Oscar Wilde. The Bard Conservatory Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, joins an exciting principal cast of singers in a performance, directed by R. B. Schlather, of Richard Strauss’s once infamous, now famous opera, Salome—a biblical story with a twist. Performances will be held on Friday, March 18 at 8 pm and Sunday, March 20 at 2pm in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. Tickets start at $25, with free tickets for Bard students. Virtual livestream tickets are pay what you wish. To purchase or reserve tickets visit fishercenter.bard.edu, call 845-758-7900 (Mon-Fri 10am-5pm), or email [email protected].

Adapted from Oscar Wilde’s one-act play, Richard Strauss’s opera Salome depicts the biblical story of Salome, the Judean princess who demanded, and obtained, the head of St. John the Baptist. Bard Visiting Associate Professor of Music Peter Laki writes that the first performance of Salome, given in Dresden on December 9, 1905, caught even the most progressive critics off guard. “There was little doubt that the opera was a masterpiece, that its music was radically innovative, even ‘revolutionary,’ but many were profoundly disturbed by the image of Salome kissing the severed head of John the Baptist on the mouth,” writes Laki, stressing that, despite its early notoriety, Salome was Strauss’s first successful opera and went on to become part of the standard repertoire of every house that can meet the almost superhuman demands it places on the singers and the enormous orchestra alike. “The opera certainly stands with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, which followed eight years later, at the threshold of a new era. It did away with many old taboos and presented human situations and emotions in a way they had never been presented before.  Strauss made an old story breathtakingly new, boldly confronting the dark sides of the human psyche.”

Salome is directed by R. B. Schlather with the Bard Conservatory Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein. The performance features Alexandra Loutsion (Salome), Jay Hunter Morris (Herod), Nathan Berg (Jochanaan), and Katharine Goeldner (Herodias).