Bard Music Festival Presents
Program Twelve • Symphonic Poetry and Spirituality in the Silver Age
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The decades before the Revolution saw a cultural flourishing in Russia, notable for its spiritual and intellectual currents in poetry, painting and music.
Program 12 revisits this fruitful period with grand-scale choral symphonies by two of its leading lights: former classmates Scriabin and Rachmaninoff. A visionary mystic who died at just 43, Scriabin believed in the transformative power of art, as expressed in his original text for his Wagnerian, six-movement First Symphony.
By contrast, Rachmaninoff was notoriously satirized by Stravinsky as “six foot two inches of Russian gloom,” and The Bells offers a more apocalyptic vision. However, the work— Rachmaninoff’s favorite of his own compositions—concludes in the major mode, its warm string melody suggesting serenity and hope.
4 pm Preconcert Talk
5 pm Performance: Mané Galoyan, soprano; Maya Lahyani, mezzo-soprano; Viktor Antipenko, tenor; Ethan Vincent, baritone; Bard Festival Chorale / James Bagwell, choral director; The Orchestra Now / Leon Botstein, music director
Aleksandr Scriabin (1872–1915)
Symphony No. 1 in E Major, Op. 26 (1900)
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943)
The Bells, Op. 35 (1913)
For more information, call 845-758-7900, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/symphonic-poetry-and-spirituality-in-the-silver-age/.
Time: 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater