News

Artist-in-Residence and pianist Isabelle O’Connell has been awarded a Culture Ireland Grant for 2026. The Culture Ireland Grant supports the presentation and promotion of Irish arts internationally, funding travel and amenities for artists. The grant supported her recital at Johanneskirche Schlachtensee in Berlin on November 29, 2025, which was intended as a conversation between impressionist and contemporary sounds. The solo recital featured works by Claude Debussy, Caroline Shaw, and Jane O’Leary, the latter inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's design of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

O’Connell teaches in the Bard Conservatory of Music, which offers undergraduate and graduate degrees to provide the best possible preparation for a person dedicated to a life immersed in the creation and performance of music.

The Bard College Conservatory of Music and Graduate Vocal Arts Program (VAP) will present a dual performance of operatic comedy with Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amelia Goes to the Ball and Giacomo Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, taking place on March 6 and March 8. A new production by stage director Doug Fitch, the operas will be performed by singers from Bard’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program with the Bard Conservatory Orchestra, conducted by James Bagwell, director of music performance studies and professor of music at Bard.

With comic invention and lyrical wit, Amelia Goes to the Ball, Menotti’s first staged opera, relays the story of an Italian socialite’s navigation of hurdles to attend the season’s first ball, while Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi transforms a Dantean tale of fraud into a masterclass of operatic irony and memorable motifs. Both one-acts showcase composers at the height of craft, blending human folly, clever plotting, and musical sophistication.

The operas will be sung in Italian with English subtitles. The events will take place on Friday, March 6 at 7pm and Sunday, March 8 at 2pm in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. Tickets start at $20. Free tickets are available to Bard students through the Passloff Pass. The program will be livestreamed, with virtual tickets offered as pay what you wish. All proceeds will directly support Bard Conservatory students. To purchase or reserve tickets, please visit the Fisher Center Website or call 845-758-7900 (Monday–Friday, 10 am–5 pm), or email [email protected].

Every two years, Bard Conservatory and VAP students mount a full-scale opera production as an exceptional opportunity for Hudson Valley audiences to experience the performances of emerging artists and explore the rich, theatrical world of opera. This year, the program’s comedic operas bring to life witty tales of love, greed, and disguise in an evening of charm and laughter.

About the Artists

James Bagwell (conductor) maintains an active schedule as a conductor of choral, orchestral, and opera repertoire. He is professor of music and director of performance studies at Bard College, and co-director of the Bard Conservatory Graduate Program in Conducting. Bagwell also serves as director of choruses for the Bard Music Festival and as associate conductor of The Orchestra Now. His extensive performance history includes appearances at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center with ensembles such as the American Symphony Orchestra, The Collegiate Chorale, and numerous international orchestras.

Doug Fitch (director) is an internationally acclaimed director and designer whose work spans opera, theater, architecture, and visual art. His productions have been seen at the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, and Santa Fe Opera, among others. Known for his inventive, interdisciplinary approach to performance, Fitch co-founded the production company Giants Are Small, through which he has created genre-defying collaborations that merge live music, design, and storytelling.

Exhibition Credits
The graduate student-curated exhibitions and projects at CCS Bard are part of the requirements for the master of arts degree and are made possible with support from Lonti Ebers; Robert Soros and the Enterprise Foundation; the Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg Student Exhibition Fund; the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Family Foundation; the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; The Wortham Foundation; the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies; and the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends.

Assistant Professor and CCS Luma Fellow Lara Fresko Madra published an essay on research-based artist Hande Sever’s solo exhibition at REDCAT in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Take off your eyes consisted of two collections from 2023 and 2025 that combine text and images Sever found in collections in Southern California, including German photography in the Ottoman Empire and archival footage of Ronald Reagan and former Turkish president Kenan Evren. “[These] photographs variously juxtapose scenes of deterioration, overgrowth, development, and progress,” Madra writes. “The tension born out of contrast, within a single image or between the two sets of photographs, articulates not only what is lost [but also] what covered up or replaced that loss.”

The Center for Curatorial Studies is an intensive course of study in the history of contemporary art, criticism, and exhibition making. The graduate program provides extensive practical experience in exhibition-making within a professional museum setting. The faculty include curators, scholars, writers, art historians, and other professionals committed to innovation in the arts.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/holding-and-disappearing-traces-of-the-past/

An essay by Drew Thompson, associate professor at the Bard Graduate Center, appeared in a book featured in the Paris Photo–Aperture 2025 PhotoBook Awards, an annual celebration of the photobook medium’s contributions to the evolving narrative of photography. Thompson’s essay, “Envisioning Liberation: A Brief History of PhotoBooks in Mozambique,” appeared in the book Generalized Visual Resistance: Photobooks and Liberation Movements, an anthology that examines the importance of visual culture in anticolonial struggles. The book is a critical reflection on memory and images through a collection of rare photography books produced as part of liberation movements for independence in the former Portuguese colonies in Africa between the 1960s and 1980s. “The history of photobooks looks different from the vantage point of the African continent,” Thompson writes in his essay.

The Bard Graduate Center is devoted to the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through research, advanced degrees, exhibitions, publications, and events.
https://www.parisphoto.com/en-gb/program/paris-photo-aperture-photobook-awards.html

Performance Pairs Rarely-Heard Works by Čiurlionis, Kaprálová, and Lyatoshynsky with Pieces by Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky

The Orchestra Now (TŌN) launches its 11^th season of New York City concerts led by Music Director Leon Botstein with Sounds and Echoes of Empire, on October 13, at Carnegie Hall.  The program features both neglected and more familiar Eastern European works from the late-19^th and early-20^th centuries that reflect the nationalism of the Russian Empire. The first of two performances at Carnegie Hall this season, the concert will initially be performed at the Fisher Center at Bard on October 11-12 and livestreamed on TŌNtube.

TŌN will next perform a FREE concert in Manhattan featuring Strauss’s beloved tone poem Don Juan and works by Vaughan Williams, Henry Purcell, and Samuel Barber led by Resident Conductor Zachary Schwartzman at Peter Norton Symphony Space on November 23.

For detailed information about the 2025-26 season, visit ton.bard.edu.

Sounds and Echoes of Empire
Monday, October 13, 2025, at 7 pm
Carnegie Hall, Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
The Orchestra Now
Leon Botstein, conductor
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: Overture on Russian Themes in D Major, Op. 28
Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis: In the Forest (Miške)
Vítězslava Kaprálová: Military Sinfonietta, Op. 11 (Vojenská Symfonieta)
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Festival Coronation March, TH 50
Boris Lyatoshynsky: Symphony No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 50
The evening presents familiar pieces like Rimsky-Korsakov’s Overture on Russian Themes and Tchaikovsky’s grand Festival Coronation March, written to celebrate the coronation of Alexander III, alongside lesser-known works from the same time period. The symphonic poem In the Forest, by Lithuanian composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, was among his earliest musical successes. The Military Sinfonietta of Vítězslava Kaprálová brought international exposure when the work received the prestigious Smetana Foundation award. Boris Lyatoshynsky’s Third Symphony was premiered in his native Ukraine in 1951, but was later revised after being banned by Soviet authorities. TŌN performs the original version in this concert.

Tickets, priced at $29-$50, are available at carnegiehall.org, by calling CarnegieCharge at 212.247.7800, or at the Carnegie Hall box office at 57^th & 7th Avenue.