Bard Conservatory of Music News Archive

Xinyi Wang has experienced quarantine twice in the past few months, and although she has been quarantined for a total of three months, she still has a bright smile on her face. Her initial period of isolation was in Jiangsu, China, in January, when she went home from Bard for winter break. She was quarantined with her family during the week of the annual spring festival. Even though Xinyi was stuck inside, she enjoyed herself because “spring festival was fun, with a lot of eating and drinking.” Her time there was focused on her family, while her time at Bard has been focused on schoolwork.

Xinyi managed to make it back to Bard, and was surprised to be quarantined again because of COVID-19 regulations, but working on her Senior Project in classical studies has kept her busy. For her project she chose to write about an inspiring Greek female character: Ariadne, daughter of Pasiphaë and the Cretan king Minos, who helped the Athenian hero Theseus escape the Labyrinth after he slew the Minotaur. She discovered the character through her adviser, classics professor Lauren Curtis, and was intrigued by how a female character was viewed in ancient poetry and how the same character is perceived in 20th-century opera. Xinyi appreciates her professors, who have stayed connected with her through this difficult time. She is also grateful for her adviser, who has been a help above and beyond academics. “She is very supportive,” Xinyi exclaims. “She pushes me to get out more.”

Xinyi, who has one more year at Bard as a double major in the Bard College Conservatory of Music, finds joy in playing her violin and staying connected to her friends via WeChat. She has learned to enjoy the peace of the quiet campus. As she chooses her classes for the fall, she is looking forward to the coming academic year, when the campus will be full of people again.

Chairman Mao banned all classical music in 1966, but that didn’t stop some from listening to the music they loved, sometimes as an act of rebellion. Beethoven was a favorite. Jindong Cai, director of the US-China Music Institute at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, talks about a life-changing moment as a teenager: secretly listening to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 on a scratchy gramophone at a friend’s house.

The Times spotlights Bard Conservatory violist Molly Carr and her nonprofit organization Project: Music Heals Us, whose bedside concerts, performed by musicians playing over the phone from around the country, are bringing comfort to hospitalized COVID-19 patients in New York City.
 

GRAMMY Award–winning composer and longtime Bard professor Joan Tower’s first composition was “a total disaster.” Sixty years later, Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts at Bard, is one of the most celebrated composers in the world. Here, she talks with Kai Talim for Skip the Repeat about her wonderful childhood in Bolivia, her drive to compose, and how she, reluctantly at first, began to teach. “I came up here [to Bard] and I fell in love with this campus.... I love to teach. I didn’t know about that at the time. You have to start teaching to know whether you like it or not.”

Julia Bullock, Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program alumna, offers the New York Times Frederica von Stade’s stunning performance of Massenet’s “Cendrillon” as her five minutes that will make you love opera.

The Bard Conservatory Orchestra joins an exciting principal cast of singers in a semi-staged performance of Richard Strauss’s once infamous, now famous opera, Salome—a biblical story, with a twist. The program, directed by R. B. Schlather and performed by the Bard Conservatory Orchestra, Leon Botstein, conductor, features leading opera singers Melody Moore, Jay Hunter Morris, Nathan Berg, Betsy Bishop, Robert Stahley, and others, including students of the Conservatory’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program. Salome takes place Friday, April 3, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, April 5, at 2 p.m. in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. Tickets start at $15 and can be ordered online at fishercenter.bard.edu or by calling the box office at 845-758-7900. $5 student tickets are available to Bard undergraduate students through the Passloff Pass.

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 (1905)
libretto:  Hedwig Lachmann (1865-1918) after Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
music:  Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Cast:

Melody Moore, Salome
Jay Hunter Morris, Herod
Nathan Berg, Jochanaan
Betsy Bishop, Herodias
Robert Stahley, Narraboth

Hailey MacEvoy ’20, Page of Herodias 
Ricardo Lugo, First Nazarene 
Ben Wager, First Soldier 
Andrew Potter, Second Soldier 
Marc Molomet, First Jew
Vincent Festa, Second Jew
Cody Ray Caho ’21,Third Jew
Chauncey Parker, Fourth Jew
Paul An, Fifth Jew
Paul LaRosa, Second Nazarene 
Lighting Designer: Jax Messenger
Projection Designer: S. Katy Tucker

To purchase tickets, call the Fisher Center box office at 845-758-7900 or go to fishercenter.bard.edu.
 

On Wednesday, February 26, three collegiate wind chamber ensembles performed in a master class with world-renowned French horn player Radovan Vlatković through the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. First up, a quintet of undergrads from the Bard College Conservatory’s five-year double-degree program in music and the liberal arts: Jillian Reed ’21, on flute; Kira Shiner ’21, oboe; Collin Lewis ’21, clarinet; Tim Woerner ’20, bassoon; and Eleni Georgiadis ’21, horn. The group performed Samuel Barber’s Summer Music for wind quintet for a full house in the Center’s Rose Studio. Watch their outstanding performance, and stay tuned for Vlatković’s praise of their “beautiful playing” during his critique.

Fourteen singers. Five operas. An extraordinary undertaking. Mark your calendars for Rest in Pieces: In Memory of Opera on March 6, directed by Stephanie Blythe, renowned mezzo-soprano and Bard Vocal Arts Program director.