2025 Bard Music Festival Featured in the New Yorker
Bohuslav Martinů. Photo courtesy of Bohuslav Martinů Centre, Polička
Bard SummerScape’s 2025 Bard Music Festival, a two-week exploration of “Martinů and His World,” was featured in the New Yorker. Martinů is “the kind of figure who profits from Botstein’s summertime festivals, which, for 35 years, have demonstrated how much great music exists outside the standard repertory,” writes Alex Ross. “After days of immersion, I wanted to hear still more.” The Czech composer was unusually prolific, having written almost 400 works, including six symphonies, 14 operas, numerous ballets, close to 30 concertos, and a wealth of chamber, vocal, and instrumental music. Ross notes that even given the practical constraints with such a vast repertoire, Bard was able to “touch upon most aspects of Martinů’s output,” and states that the 1937 opera Julietta is a “beautifully disorienting Surrealist tale in which a lovelorn young man abandons reality for a world of dreams,” adding that such a world “is indistinguishable from the dreamscape of Martinů’s music.”
Post Date: 09-10-2025
Post Date: 09-10-2025