Bard Music Festival Presents
Program One • Vaughan Williams: Becoming an English Composer
7:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Launching the 33rd Bard Music Festival, Program One harnesses Bard’s unusual ability to integrate orchestral, choral, vocal, and chamber works within a single event. This concert offers an overview of Vaughan Williams’s long and prolific career, from his early songs and Piano Quintet to his neo-classical D-minor Violin Concerto and famed Tallis Fantasia, which marries folk modality with Elizabethan themes in a stirring evocation of Englishness.
As a reminder of the way his contemporaries most often encountered his music, the program will open and close with two of Vaughan Williams’s best-loved hymn settings: “Down Ampney,” named for the village of his birth, and the “Old Hundredth” psalm. A set of variations embodying a potted history of English music, this was written for the coronation of Elizabeth II and sung again five years later at the composer’s own funeral.
7 pm performance with commentary by Leon Botstein; with the Horszowski Trio and guests; William Ferguson, tenor; Theo Hoffman, baritone; Renée Anne Louprette, organ; Grace Park, violin; Sun-Ly Pierce, mezzo-soprano; Brandie Sutton, soprano; Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, music director; The Orchestra Now, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)
“Down Ampney (Come Down, O Love Divine)” from The English Hymnal (1906)
Quintet for piano and strings in C minor (1903)
Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis (1910)
Concerto in D minor for violin and strings (1925)
Serenade to Music (1938)
O taste and see (1953)
Songs
Arr. Ralph Vaughan Williams
Selections from Five English Folk Songs (1913)
“Old Hundredth Psalm Tune” (1953)
For more information, call 845-758-7900, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/program-one-vaughan-williams-becoming-an-english-composer/.
Time: 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater
Save this Event: