Rachmaninoff in Our Times: The New Yorker Reviews 2022 Bard Music Festival

“How radical was Rachmaninoff?” asks Alex Ross in his review of the 2022 Bard Music Festival for the New Yorker. Sergei Rachmaninoff “was almost universally considered a throwback during his lifetime,” Ross writes, with critics scorning him as “a purveyor of late-Romantic schlock,” and neither progressives nor conservatives seeing him as innovative. Still, his music proved massively popular, leading Ross to ask: “Can such a figure really be deemed an anachronism?” This question, he writes, was at the heart of this year’s Bard Music Festival, especially in light of the war in Ukraine, a topic from which many purveyors of Russian classical music try to distance themselves—but not Bard. “At Bard, the first person to come onstage was the formidable young Ukrainian pianist Artem Yasynskyy, who launched into an exceptionally grim, inward account of the ‘C-Sharp-Minor Prelude,’” Ross recounts. Highlights from the program include a “rich-hued performance” of “The Isle of the Dead” by The Orchestra Now (TŌN) and the one-act opera “The Miserly Knight,” led by Leon Botstein, “with Nathan Berg giving an impressively glowering account of the title role.” The 32nd Bard Music Festival concluded on August 14, 2022, and will return in August 2023 with “Vaughan Williams and His World.”

Post Date: 08-30-2022