The Fisher Center at Bard Announces Summerscape 2026, Bringing Opera, Dance, Spiegeltent, and the 36th Bard Music Festival, Mozart and His World, to the Stunning Hudson River Valley Setting, June 25 – August 16
The Fisher Center at Bard College. Photo by by Peter Aaron '68
The Fisher Center at Bard, one of the country’s leading multidisciplinary producing houses, offering extraordinary support to artists to realize ambitious and groundbreaking projects, announces SummerScape 2026, June 25 – August 16. In this year’s edition of the summer-long festival, monumental legacies are reintroduced through vital reconsiderations and revelatory approaches to rarely performed works; today’s visionaries are given a platform to continue to grow their practices; and audiences gather for a cornucopia of wildly distinct performances in the idyllic Hudson Valley. Deemed by The New York Times “a hothouse for the creation of uncompromising, cross-disciplinary hits,” SummerScape continues in this vein of artform-forwarding reflection and revelry.
Since its founding in 2003, SummerScape has been a wellspring for breathtaking contemporary dance. Resident Choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s Fisher Center LAB commission, Pastoral, was celebrated last year in a New York Times Critic’s Pick review as “delightfully unpredictable… inventively complex” before going on to be performed at Lincoln Center. After its world premiere at SummerScape, Sufjan Stevens, Justin Peck, and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s 2023 dance musical Illinoise transferred to Broadway and won the 2024 Tony Award for Best Choreography. Now, legendary choreographer Lucinda Childs returns to SummerScape—following the 2009 revival of her “ravishing” (The New York Times) 1979 work, Dance—in one of Lucinda Childs Dance Company’s rare North American engagements this year. The program, titled Lucinda Childs: Momentary Reprise (June 26–28), is a Fisher LAB commission, spanning North American premieres and beloved revivals, and featuring collaborations with Philip Glass, John Adams, Anri Sala, and two titans of their respective crafts whom we lost in 2025: Robert Wilson and Frank Gehry.
With vastly different approaches to opera staging, SummerScape 2026 both examines the classical repertoire and contributes to the contemporary canon. Two major SummerScape productions, the world premiere of Courtney Bryan’s Suddenly Last Summer and Richard Strauss’s The Egyptian Helen (Die ägyptische Helena), affirm opera’s vitality and dexterity—whether the mythic quality it can bring to a twisted family tale, or the intimacy it can lend to myth. The feverish, Tennessee Williams-based Suddenly Last Summer (June 25 – July 19) brings 2023 MacArthur Fellow and “pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (The New York Times) Courtney Bryan to SummerScape. Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester and Tony-nominated director Daniel Fish (who in 2015 rocked SummerScape, and not long after, Broadway, with his acclaimed unmasking of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!) have teamed up to pen its libretto, with Fish directing. Adapted from Williams’s one-act Southern gothic play set in New Orleans (Bryan’s hometown), Suddenly Last Summer is conceived as a hybrid music-theater work, experimenting with form as Bryan’s score is woven in and around the spoken drama. The opera tells the story of the wealthy Venable family and a young woman’s struggle to speak truth to power. It is the first presentation of one of the Fisher Center’s three recently announced inaugural Fisher Center LAB Civis Hope Commissions.
Bard SummerScape likewise continues its annual tradition of presenting a vital full production of a seldom staged opera, this year with Richard Strauss’s The Egyptian Helen, with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, directed by Christian Räth, with the American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein, July 24 – August 2. Botstein considers Strauss the genuine modern heir to Mozart—the subject of this summer’s Bard Music Festival. In The Egyptian Helen, Strauss interprets the Helen myth through a hymnic score with grand orchestrations and sumptuous vocal writing. Räth’s resplendent staging sees the director once again approaching a rare Strauss work, after his 2022 SummerScape production of The Silent Woman. As that “delightful…witty” (The New York Times, in a Critic’s Pick review) presentation was for his 1935 comic opera, this year’s production will, similarly, for many audience members, be an eye-opening introduction to Strauss’s dazzling 1928 epic.
In 2026, the 36th Bard Music Festival—deemed by The Los Angeles Times “the most imaginative summer music festival in the country”—takes on one of classical music’s most towering legacies, that of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (1756–91). The Bard Music Festival (Co-Artistic Directors Leon Botstein and Christopher H. Gibbs) promotes new ways of understanding and presenting the history of music to a contemporary audience, annually taking a single composer (their life, times, and work) as the main subject.
Throughout SummerScape, programming in the Spiegeltent showcases a dynamic blend of live music, comedy, and cabaret, creating an inclusive gathering place for live performance and dancing all summer long. Jason Collins, Fisher Center Producer & Spiegeltent Curator, organizes this year’s lineup, with Spiegeltent darling Adrienne Truscott emceeing, and Andy Monk returning as the host and co-curator of the After Hours series. See below for a growing list of artists featured this summer; full Spiegeltent programming will be announced at a later date.
SummerScape 2026 unfolds in a milestone year for the Fisher Center at Bard, with their new 25,000-square-foot performing arts studio building—designed by Maya Lin in partnership with architects Bialosky and theatre and acoustic consultants Charcoalblue—nearing completion. Opening details for the building, which will provide a home for the Fisher Center LAB, will be announced soon.
SummerScape 2026 Highlights, Descriptions, and ScheduleFisher Center LAB
Fisher Center LAB Civis Hope Commission/World Premiere
Music by Courtney Bryan
Libretto by Gideon Lester and Daniel Fish based on the play by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Daniel Fish
Music Direction and Supervision by Nathan Koci
Thursday, June 25 at 7:30 pm
Saturday, June 27 at 7:30 pm
Sunday, June 28 at 3 pm
Tuesday, June 30 at 7:30 pm
Wednesday, July 1 at 3 pm
Friday, July 3 at 3 pm
Sunday, July 5 at 3 pm
Wednesday, July 8 at 3 pm
Thursday, July 9 at 7:30 pm
Saturday, July 11 at 3 pm
Sunday, July 12 at 3 pm
Wednesday, July 15 at 3 pm
Thursday, July 16 at 7:30 pm
Saturday, July 18 at 3 pm
Sunday, July 19 at 3 pm
LUMA Theater
A thrilling new opera based on Tennessee Williams’s fever-dream of a play about a family secret, and a mother’s desperate attempt to silence the truth. In this hybrid music-theater work, Courtney Bryan premieres a ravishing score inspired by the play’s two worlds: the Mediterranean coast and the Garden District of New Orleans, Bryan’s hometown. Director Daniel Fish, who staged Fisher Center LAB’s Tony Award-winning Oklahoma!, and Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester have shaped a libretto from Williams’s tale of power, desire, and the lengths a family will go to protect its legacy.
The poet Sebastian Venable died mysteriously in Spain last summer. His cousin Catharine—sung by SummerScape favorite Mikaela Bennett (Most Happy in Concert)—was with him and has since returned to New Orleans, where she obsessively recounts the story of his death. Now, Sebastian’s mother, played by renowned actor Tina Benko, is attempting to bribe a doctor to lobotomize her niece and cut the story from her memory forever.
Bryan, who began developing Suddenly Last Summer as composer-in-residence at Opera Philadelphia, said, “The first 20th-century opera I saw, while still in high school, was André Previn and Philip Littell’s setting of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and it left a lasting impression, seeing how opera with contemporary language could complement the storytelling of such a powerful play. I am drawn to the complex worlds that Williams creates and look forward to writing music that draws upon the beauty and terror in this Southern Gothic story.”
A world premiere and the first Fisher Center LAB Civis Hope Commission to premiere, this searing new opera brings radiant new life to Williams’s study of a confrontation between truth and power.
A co-production with Opera Philadelphia.
Presented by special arrangement with The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee.
The company features Mikaela Bennett as Catharine Holly and Tina Benko as Mrs. Venable, with additional casting to be announced this spring. The creative team includes Marsha Ginsberg (Scenic Design), Terese Wadden (Costume Design), Stacey Derosier (Lighting Design), and Joshua Thorson (Projection Design). Choral Ensemble: Young People's Chorus of New York City, Francisco J. Núñez, Founder and Artistic Director. Producer: Carter Edwards; Casting: Taylor Williams, CSA; Associate Direction: Mikhaela Mahony; Stage Management: Jason Kaiser.
Recent works include DREAMING (Freedom Sounds), performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble at New York’s Kaufman Music Center; Visual Rhythms, a new art-inspired orchestral piece for Jacksonville Symphony; House of Pianos, which Bryan premiered in 2023 with the LA Phil New Music Group (chamber ensemble version) and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (full orchestra version); and Gathering Song (libretto by Tazewell Thompson), composed for bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green and the New York Philharmonic.
Bryan’s compositions have been performed by Opera Philadelphia (Composer in Residence, 2022–2024), the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (Creative Partner, 2020–2023), Jacksonville Symphony (Mary Carr Patton Composer-In-Residence, 2018–2020), London Sinfonietta, LA Phil, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and Chicago Sinfonietta in a wide range of renowned venues, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and Blue Note Jazz Club.
Recent accolades include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2018), Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition (2019–2020), United States Artists Fellowship (2020), and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship (2020–2021). She is the Albert and Linda Mintz Professor of Music at Newcomb College in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. Her music is published by Boosey & Hawkes.
His work has been seen at theaters and festivals throughout the U.S. and Europe, including the Walker Art Center, PuSh, Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival, Vooruit, Festival TransAmériques, Noorderzon Festival, The Chocolate Factory Theater, The Public Theater’s Under The Radar, Opera Philadelphia/Curtis Opera Theatre, American Repertory Theater, Yale Repertory Theatre, McCarter Theatre, Signature Theatre, The Shakespeare Theater Company, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Staatstheater Braunschweig, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Residencies and commissions include MacDowell, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Mass MoCA, The Chocolate Factory Theater, and LMCC/Governors Island.
A Tony and Olivier Award-winning creative producer, festival director, and dramaturg, he has collaborated with and commissioned a broad range of American and international artists across disciplines, including Romeo Castellucci, Justin Vivian Bond, Tania El Khoury, Brice Marden, Sarah Michelson, Claudia Rankine, Kaija Saariaho, Peter Sellars, and Anna Deavere Smith.
Recent projects include the world premiere of Sufjan Stevens, Justin Peck, and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Illinoise (Tony Award); Common Ground, an international festival on the politics of land and food; Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! (Tony Award; Olivier Award); Pam Tanowitz’s Four Quartets and Song of Songs; Ronald K. Brown and Meshell Ndegeocello’s Grace and Mercy; and Peter Sellars’s film This body is so impermanent… Productions he has developed and commissioned have toured to theaters and art centers around the world, including BAM (Brooklyn); Circle in the Square (Broadway); CAP UCLA (Los Angeles); Lincoln Center; St Ann’s Warehouse (Brooklyn); New York City Center; Barbican (London); Walker Art Center (Minneapolis); Spielart (Munich); Onassis Stegi (Athens); Edinburgh International Festival; and many others.
Fisher Center LAB
Fisher Center LAB Commission/North American Premiere
Choreography by Lucinda Childs
Collaborations with John Adams, Frank Gehry, Philip Glass, Anri Sala, and Robert Wilson
Featuring Lucinda Childs Dance Company
Friday, June 26 at 7 pm
Saturday, June 27 at 2 pm
Sunday, June 28 at 2 pm
Sosnoff Theater
Lucinda Childs, a defining force in American dance, returns to Bard SummerScape with a one-of-a-kind program of new and iconic works.
Celebrated for choreography that is rigorous, inventive, and hypnotically precise, Childs has shaped generations of dancers and choreographers. This program includes the North American premieres of several major new works, as well as her groundbreaking collaborations with some of the most influential artists of our time. These include her work with composers Philip Glass and John Adams, and two luminaries lost in 2025—the late theater director Robert Wilson and Frank Gehry, architect of the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Alongside new short works for her company, Childs—marking her 86th birthday—will perform a solo, offering audiences a uniquely intimate encounter with one of the great living pioneers of contemporary dance.
The program begins with Actus, a duet set to the cantata “Actus Tragicus” by Johann Sebastian Bach, accompanied live by Russian star-pianist Anton Batagov. Then, Lucinda Childs herself performs a new adaptation of an original solo from 1965 titled Geranium ’64. The solo continues Childs’s prolific collaborative record with video work by the renowned visual artist Anri Sala. Available Light brought together three giants of postwar American culture: choreographer Lucinda Childs, composer John Adams, and architect Frank Gehry in a new production first staged in 1983, and remounted in 2015. The company will perform an excerpt of the piece in honor of the late Frank Gehry (1929–2025), architect of the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. Field Dance 2 is an ensemble piece staged in special tribute to Robert Wilson (1941–2025), excerpted from Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, one of the most iconic stage pieces of the 20th century. The evening closes with Distant Figure, a new choreographic work for six dancers with music by Philip Glass. This final work is accompanied again live by Batagov, who will play the 2017 composition that Glass wrote for his long-standing artistic partner Lucinda Childs.
In 2009, Dance—Childs’s iconic 1979 collaboration with Glass and visual artist Sol LeWitt—was redeveloped and premiered at Bard SummerScape, sparking a major international revival. Today, the Fisher Center remains the place to see the Lucinda Childs Dance Company in the United States, offering an unmatched opportunity to experience her artistry, legacy, and ongoing creative vision.
The creative team is Lucinda Childs (Choreography), Philip Glass, John Adams, and Johann Sebastian Bach (Music), Beverly Emmons (Lighting Design), Anri Sala (Visual Design/Multimedia Design). Performers include to-be-announced dancers of Lucinda Childs Dance Company and pianist Anton Batagov. The Lucinda Childs Dance Company is produced and managed by The Blanket. Production Management: Tricia Toliver; Company Management: Ammara Shafqat; Video Programming: Dominik Hildebrand.
The Egyptian Helen
Music by Richard Strauss
Libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Directed by Christian Räth
American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein
Sung in German with English supertitles
Friday, July 24 at 6 pm
Sunday, July 26 at 2 pm
Wednesday, July 29 at 2 pm
Friday, July 31 at 4 pm
Sunday, August 2 at 2 pm
Sosnoff Theater
“Botstein, and his annual opera production at Bard, seem more invaluable by the year.” —The New York Times
A hypnotic blend of myth, melodrama, and psychological intrigue, Richard Strauss’s seldom heard The Egyptian Helen (Die ägyptische Helena) receives a lavish, rare U.S. staging at Bard SummerScape.
Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal reimagine the Helen myth, set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, as a tale of doubling: a phantom Helen returns to Troy, while the real, faithful Helen has been spirited away from harm. The vengeful husband, Menelaus, surrenders to love; the unfaithful Helen renews her devotion. The opera unfolds as a rich exploration of the complexities and contradictions of love, sexuality, and marriage.
Director Christian Räth (Meyerbeer’s Le prophète, Strauss’s The Silent Woman, Korngold’s The Miracle of Heliane) returns for his fourth Bard SummerScape to helm a full production of this neglected Strauss masterpiece. In Räth’s visionary staging, the mystical sorceress Aithra becomes the director of Helen and Menelaus’s story, seeing Helen as her alter ego and transforming the opera into a prism of fame, fantasy, and the creation of identity.
Making her SummerScape debut, the “compelling” (The New York Times) soprano Ambur Braid makes her role debut as Helena, joined by SummerScape Opera favorites: the “incredible” (OperaWire) tenor John Matthew Myers (Smetana’s Dalibor) as Menelaus and the “bright and earnest” (The New York Times) soprano Jana McIntyre (Strauss’s The Silent Woman) as Aithra. Anchored by the American Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Maestro Leon Botstein, this production continues Bard’s decades-long tradition of showcasing rare operatic gems with artists of the highest caliber.
The principals are Ambur Braid (soprano) as Helena, wife of Menelaus; John Matthew Myers (tenor) as Menelaus, King of Sparta; Jana McIntyre (soprano) as Aithra, the daughter of an Egyptian King: a sorceress; Blake Denson (baritone) as Altair; and Deborah Nansteel (mezzo-soprano) as the Omniscient Seashell. The creative team is Christian Räth (Stage Direction), Christian Räth and Daniel Unger (Scenic Design), Mattie Ullrich (Costume Design),
Tyler Micoleau (Lighting Design), Elaine J. McCarthy (Projection Design), Catherine Galasso (Choreography), and Brittany Rappise (Hair and Makeup Design).
Recent projects include his debut with Gothenburg Opera directing Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta and the world premiere of Toshio Hosokawa’s new opera Natasha for New National Theatre Tokyo; Meyerbeer’s Le prophète (2024), Strauss’s The Silent Woman (2022), and Korngold’s The Miracle of Heliane (2019) at Bard SummerScape; Der Freischütz and Macbeth at the Wiener Staatsoper; Le Baron Tzigane at the Grand Théâtre de Genève; L’italiana in Algeri at Portland Opera; and the direction and design of Kiss Me, Kate for the Haut école de musique de Genève, in collaboration with the Théâtre du Galpon, Geneva. Räth has conceived and directed several unique historical events in Egypt, including “The Pharaohs’ Golden Parade,” celebrating the journey of 22 royal mummies through the city of Cairo, and the opening ceremony of the antique “Sphinx Road” at Luxor. These productions involved more than a thousand participants and were broadcast worldwide. He was also the artistic director of the “Silver Jubilee” at the Royal Court of Jordan in 2024.
Weekend One: The Perils of Genius
August 7–9
Weekend Two: The Universal Musician
August 13–16
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart: the most celebrated and recognized name in classical music. More has been written about his career and music, more myths spun about his childhood, personality, and death, more films made about his life or using his music than of any other composer. How might we today come to terms with, as Stendhal put it, “the ultimate and lasting effect of Mozart’s music on the human heart?”
Mozart’s shifting but enduring place in our cultural history stems from his expansion of the expressive power and reach of musical ideas and thought, first in the compositions of a child prodigy, and last in the philosophically complex operas written in his prime and the exquisite late chamber music. The 36th Bard Music Festival will confront the many Mozart myths and examine his legacy. Audiences will come into contact with his life and work in the context of the politics and thought of the 18th century in the Habsburg Empire under Maria Theresa and Joseph II, in Salzburg, where he and his father Leopold worked, and in Vienna, where Mozart spent the last decade of his life.
The festival will explore Mozart’s work and life in eleven themed concerts, with orchestral concerts featuring the American Symphony Orchestra and The Orchestra Now, Bard’s unique graduate training orchestra, both led by music director Leon Botstein. As in previous seasons, the Bard Festival Chorale takes part in all choral works under the direction of James Bagwell. Mozart’s music will be heard alongside works by Joseph and Michael Haydn, Antonio Salieri, Johann Christian Bach, Franz Süssmayr, Joseph Eybler, Thomas Attwood, and Marianna Martines, among others. Programs will include popular music, examples of the theater of the day, rarely performed compositions such as the late Masonic Cantata and Davidde Penitente, as well as concertos and symphonies. This summer’s final program, a semi-staged performance of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail)—the opera most performed during his lifetime—features vocal soloists including soprano Jana McIntyre and tenor Minghao Liu.
Full Bard Music Festival programming will be announced at a later date.
June 26 – August 15
A magnificent Spiegeltent returns to SummerScape for its 19th year. This year’s Spiegeltent programs are curated by Jason Collins, Fisher Center Producer & Spiegeltent Curator. Spiegeltent darling Adrienne Truscott returns as the season’s emcee, and local favorite Andy Monk returns as the host and co-curator of the After Hours series.
Featured acts include the return of favorites Justin Vivian Bond, Martha Redbone, Adrienne Truscott, the Tray Wellington Band, and Chanel Ali, and debuts by BenDeLaCreme, James Austin Johnson, Samora Pinderhughes, Jon Benjamin - Jazz Daredevil, and more.
The beloved Bluegrass on Hudson series returns for a fourth year, guest curated by Ruth Oxenberg and Rob Schumer. This year’s lineup features The Fretliners, The John Hartford Fiddle Tune Project, Darol Anger & Bruce Molsky, Kittel & Co., The Onlies, and Big Richard.
Sumptuous evenings of dazzling performances, drinks, and dancing await!
Full Spiegeltent programming will be announced at a later date.
Friday, August 7 at 5 pm
Manor House
$130
Before the opening night concert, celebrate the official start of the Bard Music Festival at the magnificent and picturesque 1916 Ward Manor House. Take in expansive views of the Catskill Mountains and enjoy a savory spread as the 36th Bard Music Festival, Mozart and His World, kicks off.
Summer Picnic
Saturday, August 15, from 3:30–5:30 pm
Campus Center North
Free; Reservations Required
Gather together for a picnic as Bard SummerScape draws to a close. Nestled perfectly between two Bard Music Festival concerts and before the final Spiegeltent show of the season, the afternoon will include delightful music, good cheer, and picnic meals to order.
Post Date: 02-03-2026
Since its founding in 2003, SummerScape has been a wellspring for breathtaking contemporary dance. Resident Choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s Fisher Center LAB commission, Pastoral, was celebrated last year in a New York Times Critic’s Pick review as “delightfully unpredictable… inventively complex” before going on to be performed at Lincoln Center. After its world premiere at SummerScape, Sufjan Stevens, Justin Peck, and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s 2023 dance musical Illinoise transferred to Broadway and won the 2024 Tony Award for Best Choreography. Now, legendary choreographer Lucinda Childs returns to SummerScape—following the 2009 revival of her “ravishing” (The New York Times) 1979 work, Dance—in one of Lucinda Childs Dance Company’s rare North American engagements this year. The program, titled Lucinda Childs: Momentary Reprise (June 26–28), is a Fisher LAB commission, spanning North American premieres and beloved revivals, and featuring collaborations with Philip Glass, John Adams, Anri Sala, and two titans of their respective crafts whom we lost in 2025: Robert Wilson and Frank Gehry.
With vastly different approaches to opera staging, SummerScape 2026 both examines the classical repertoire and contributes to the contemporary canon. Two major SummerScape productions, the world premiere of Courtney Bryan’s Suddenly Last Summer and Richard Strauss’s The Egyptian Helen (Die ägyptische Helena), affirm opera’s vitality and dexterity—whether the mythic quality it can bring to a twisted family tale, or the intimacy it can lend to myth. The feverish, Tennessee Williams-based Suddenly Last Summer (June 25 – July 19) brings 2023 MacArthur Fellow and “pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (The New York Times) Courtney Bryan to SummerScape. Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester and Tony-nominated director Daniel Fish (who in 2015 rocked SummerScape, and not long after, Broadway, with his acclaimed unmasking of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!) have teamed up to pen its libretto, with Fish directing. Adapted from Williams’s one-act Southern gothic play set in New Orleans (Bryan’s hometown), Suddenly Last Summer is conceived as a hybrid music-theater work, experimenting with form as Bryan’s score is woven in and around the spoken drama. The opera tells the story of the wealthy Venable family and a young woman’s struggle to speak truth to power. It is the first presentation of one of the Fisher Center’s three recently announced inaugural Fisher Center LAB Civis Hope Commissions.
Bard SummerScape likewise continues its annual tradition of presenting a vital full production of a seldom staged opera, this year with Richard Strauss’s The Egyptian Helen, with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, directed by Christian Räth, with the American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein, July 24 – August 2. Botstein considers Strauss the genuine modern heir to Mozart—the subject of this summer’s Bard Music Festival. In The Egyptian Helen, Strauss interprets the Helen myth through a hymnic score with grand orchestrations and sumptuous vocal writing. Räth’s resplendent staging sees the director once again approaching a rare Strauss work, after his 2022 SummerScape production of The Silent Woman. As that “delightful…witty” (The New York Times, in a Critic’s Pick review) presentation was for his 1935 comic opera, this year’s production will, similarly, for many audience members, be an eye-opening introduction to Strauss’s dazzling 1928 epic.
In 2026, the 36th Bard Music Festival—deemed by The Los Angeles Times “the most imaginative summer music festival in the country”—takes on one of classical music’s most towering legacies, that of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (1756–91). The Bard Music Festival (Co-Artistic Directors Leon Botstein and Christopher H. Gibbs) promotes new ways of understanding and presenting the history of music to a contemporary audience, annually taking a single composer (their life, times, and work) as the main subject.
Throughout SummerScape, programming in the Spiegeltent showcases a dynamic blend of live music, comedy, and cabaret, creating an inclusive gathering place for live performance and dancing all summer long. Jason Collins, Fisher Center Producer & Spiegeltent Curator, organizes this year’s lineup, with Spiegeltent darling Adrienne Truscott emceeing, and Andy Monk returning as the host and co-curator of the After Hours series. See below for a growing list of artists featured this summer; full Spiegeltent programming will be announced at a later date.
SummerScape 2026 unfolds in a milestone year for the Fisher Center at Bard, with their new 25,000-square-foot performing arts studio building—designed by Maya Lin in partnership with architects Bialosky and theatre and acoustic consultants Charcoalblue—nearing completion. Opening details for the building, which will provide a home for the Fisher Center LAB, will be announced soon.
SummerScape 2026 Highlights, Descriptions, and Schedule
Fisher Center LAB
Suddenly Last Summer
Fisher Center LAB Civis Hope Commission/World PremiereMusic by Courtney Bryan
Libretto by Gideon Lester and Daniel Fish based on the play by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Daniel Fish
Music Direction and Supervision by Nathan Koci
Thursday, June 25 at 7:30 pm
Saturday, June 27 at 7:30 pm
Sunday, June 28 at 3 pm
Tuesday, June 30 at 7:30 pm
Wednesday, July 1 at 3 pm
Friday, July 3 at 3 pm
Sunday, July 5 at 3 pm
Wednesday, July 8 at 3 pm
Thursday, July 9 at 7:30 pm
Saturday, July 11 at 3 pm
Sunday, July 12 at 3 pm
Wednesday, July 15 at 3 pm
Thursday, July 16 at 7:30 pm
Saturday, July 18 at 3 pm
Sunday, July 19 at 3 pm
LUMA Theater
A thrilling new opera based on Tennessee Williams’s fever-dream of a play about a family secret, and a mother’s desperate attempt to silence the truth. In this hybrid music-theater work, Courtney Bryan premieres a ravishing score inspired by the play’s two worlds: the Mediterranean coast and the Garden District of New Orleans, Bryan’s hometown. Director Daniel Fish, who staged Fisher Center LAB’s Tony Award-winning Oklahoma!, and Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester have shaped a libretto from Williams’s tale of power, desire, and the lengths a family will go to protect its legacy.
The poet Sebastian Venable died mysteriously in Spain last summer. His cousin Catharine—sung by SummerScape favorite Mikaela Bennett (Most Happy in Concert)—was with him and has since returned to New Orleans, where she obsessively recounts the story of his death. Now, Sebastian’s mother, played by renowned actor Tina Benko, is attempting to bribe a doctor to lobotomize her niece and cut the story from her memory forever.
Bryan, who began developing Suddenly Last Summer as composer-in-residence at Opera Philadelphia, said, “The first 20th-century opera I saw, while still in high school, was André Previn and Philip Littell’s setting of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and it left a lasting impression, seeing how opera with contemporary language could complement the storytelling of such a powerful play. I am drawn to the complex worlds that Williams creates and look forward to writing music that draws upon the beauty and terror in this Southern Gothic story.”
A world premiere and the first Fisher Center LAB Civis Hope Commission to premiere, this searing new opera brings radiant new life to Williams’s study of a confrontation between truth and power.
A co-production with Opera Philadelphia.
Presented by special arrangement with The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee.
The company features Mikaela Bennett as Catharine Holly and Tina Benko as Mrs. Venable, with additional casting to be announced this spring. The creative team includes Marsha Ginsberg (Scenic Design), Terese Wadden (Costume Design), Stacey Derosier (Lighting Design), and Joshua Thorson (Projection Design). Choral Ensemble: Young People's Chorus of New York City, Francisco J. Núñez, Founder and Artistic Director. Producer: Carter Edwards; Casting: Taylor Williams, CSA; Associate Direction: Mikhaela Mahony; Stage Management: Jason Kaiser.
About Courtney Bryan
Courtney Bryan is a Steinway Artist and 2023 MacArthur Fellow, who currently serves as composer-in-residence with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.Recent works include DREAMING (Freedom Sounds), performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble at New York’s Kaufman Music Center; Visual Rhythms, a new art-inspired orchestral piece for Jacksonville Symphony; House of Pianos, which Bryan premiered in 2023 with the LA Phil New Music Group (chamber ensemble version) and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (full orchestra version); and Gathering Song (libretto by Tazewell Thompson), composed for bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green and the New York Philharmonic.
Bryan’s compositions have been performed by Opera Philadelphia (Composer in Residence, 2022–2024), the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (Creative Partner, 2020–2023), Jacksonville Symphony (Mary Carr Patton Composer-In-Residence, 2018–2020), London Sinfonietta, LA Phil, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and Chicago Sinfonietta in a wide range of renowned venues, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and Blue Note Jazz Club.
Recent accolades include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2018), Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition (2019–2020), United States Artists Fellowship (2020), and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship (2020–2021). She is the Albert and Linda Mintz Professor of Music at Newcomb College in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. Her music is published by Boosey & Hawkes.
About Daniel Fish
Daniel Fish is a New York-based director who makes work across the boundaries of theater, film, and opera. He draws on a broad range of forms and subject matter, including plays, film scripts, contemporary fiction, essays, and found audio. His acclaimed 2019 production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! transferred to Broadway from St. Ann’s Warehouse, following its premiere at the Fisher Center at Bard, and won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. The production then transferred to London’s West End, where it won the Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival. Other recent work includes White Noise, inspired by the novel by Don DeLillo (Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, Theater Freiburg, NYU Skirball Center), Michael Gordon’s opera Acquanetta (Prototype, and also a Fisher Center premiere), Who Left This Fork Here (Baryshnikov Arts Center, Onassis Stegi), Ted Hearne’s The Source (BAM Next Wave, LA Opera, San Francisco Opera).His work has been seen at theaters and festivals throughout the U.S. and Europe, including the Walker Art Center, PuSh, Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival, Vooruit, Festival TransAmériques, Noorderzon Festival, The Chocolate Factory Theater, The Public Theater’s Under The Radar, Opera Philadelphia/Curtis Opera Theatre, American Repertory Theater, Yale Repertory Theatre, McCarter Theatre, Signature Theatre, The Shakespeare Theater Company, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Staatstheater Braunschweig, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Residencies and commissions include MacDowell, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Mass MoCA, The Chocolate Factory Theater, and LMCC/Governors Island.
He is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Department of Performance Studies and has taught at The Juilliard School, Bard College, Princeton University, and the Department of Design for Stage and Film at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He is the recipient of the 2017 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for the Theater, as well as an Obie Award and a Tony nomination.
About Gideon Lester
Gideon Lester is Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the Fisher Center at Bard. As a writer for the stage, his translations include Moliere’s Dom Juan, The Island of Slaves and The Dispute by Marivaux, Büchner’s Woyzeck, and Brecht’s Mother Courage & Her Children, and his adaptations include Kafka’s Amerika, Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.A Tony and Olivier Award-winning creative producer, festival director, and dramaturg, he has collaborated with and commissioned a broad range of American and international artists across disciplines, including Romeo Castellucci, Justin Vivian Bond, Tania El Khoury, Brice Marden, Sarah Michelson, Claudia Rankine, Kaija Saariaho, Peter Sellars, and Anna Deavere Smith.
Recent projects include the world premiere of Sufjan Stevens, Justin Peck, and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Illinoise (Tony Award); Common Ground, an international festival on the politics of land and food; Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! (Tony Award; Olivier Award); Pam Tanowitz’s Four Quartets and Song of Songs; Ronald K. Brown and Meshell Ndegeocello’s Grace and Mercy; and Peter Sellars’s film This body is so impermanent… Productions he has developed and commissioned have toured to theaters and art centers around the world, including BAM (Brooklyn); Circle in the Square (Broadway); CAP UCLA (Los Angeles); Lincoln Center; St Ann’s Warehouse (Brooklyn); New York City Center; Barbican (London); Walker Art Center (Minneapolis); Spielart (Munich); Onassis Stegi (Athens); Edinburgh International Festival; and many others.
Fisher Center LAB
Lucinda Childs: Momentary Reprise
Fisher Center LAB Commission/North American PremiereChoreography by Lucinda Childs
Collaborations with John Adams, Frank Gehry, Philip Glass, Anri Sala, and Robert Wilson
Featuring Lucinda Childs Dance Company
Friday, June 26 at 7 pm
Saturday, June 27 at 2 pm
Sunday, June 28 at 2 pm
Sosnoff Theater
Lucinda Childs, a defining force in American dance, returns to Bard SummerScape with a one-of-a-kind program of new and iconic works.
Celebrated for choreography that is rigorous, inventive, and hypnotically precise, Childs has shaped generations of dancers and choreographers. This program includes the North American premieres of several major new works, as well as her groundbreaking collaborations with some of the most influential artists of our time. These include her work with composers Philip Glass and John Adams, and two luminaries lost in 2025—the late theater director Robert Wilson and Frank Gehry, architect of the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Alongside new short works for her company, Childs—marking her 86th birthday—will perform a solo, offering audiences a uniquely intimate encounter with one of the great living pioneers of contemporary dance.
The program begins with Actus, a duet set to the cantata “Actus Tragicus” by Johann Sebastian Bach, accompanied live by Russian star-pianist Anton Batagov. Then, Lucinda Childs herself performs a new adaptation of an original solo from 1965 titled Geranium ’64. The solo continues Childs’s prolific collaborative record with video work by the renowned visual artist Anri Sala. Available Light brought together three giants of postwar American culture: choreographer Lucinda Childs, composer John Adams, and architect Frank Gehry in a new production first staged in 1983, and remounted in 2015. The company will perform an excerpt of the piece in honor of the late Frank Gehry (1929–2025), architect of the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. Field Dance 2 is an ensemble piece staged in special tribute to Robert Wilson (1941–2025), excerpted from Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, one of the most iconic stage pieces of the 20th century. The evening closes with Distant Figure, a new choreographic work for six dancers with music by Philip Glass. This final work is accompanied again live by Batagov, who will play the 2017 composition that Glass wrote for his long-standing artistic partner Lucinda Childs.
In 2009, Dance—Childs’s iconic 1979 collaboration with Glass and visual artist Sol LeWitt—was redeveloped and premiered at Bard SummerScape, sparking a major international revival. Today, the Fisher Center remains the place to see the Lucinda Childs Dance Company in the United States, offering an unmatched opportunity to experience her artistry, legacy, and ongoing creative vision.
The creative team is Lucinda Childs (Choreography), Philip Glass, John Adams, and Johann Sebastian Bach (Music), Beverly Emmons (Lighting Design), Anri Sala (Visual Design/Multimedia Design). Performers include to-be-announced dancers of Lucinda Childs Dance Company and pianist Anton Batagov. The Lucinda Childs Dance Company is produced and managed by The Blanket. Production Management: Tricia Toliver; Company Management: Ammara Shafqat; Video Programming: Dominik Hildebrand.
About Lucinda Childs
Born in 1940, Lucinda Childs began her career at the Judson Dance Theater in New York in 1963. Since forming her dance company ten years later, she has created over fifty works, both solo and ensemble, and received numerous awards, including the Dance Magazine Award, the Golden Lion award from the Venice Biennale, and the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival award for lifetime achievement. In 1976, she was featured in the landmark avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, for which she won an Obie Award. In 1979, Childs choreographed one of her most enduring works, Dance, with music by Philip Glass and film décor by Sol LeWitt, which toured internationally and has been added to the repertory of the Lyon Opera Ballet. Since 1981, Childs has choreographed over thirty works for major ballet companies and directed and choreographed a number of contemporary and eighteenth-century operas for the Los Angeles Opera, La Monnaie in Brussels, and the Opéra national du Rhin, among others. Most recently, Childs directed and choreographed Satyagraha for Opéra Nice Côte d’Azur, which premiered in November 2025.SummerScape Opera
The Egyptian Helen
(Die ägyptische Helena)
New Production
Music by Richard Strauss
Libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Directed by Christian Räth
American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein
Sung in German with English supertitles
Friday, July 24 at 6 pm
Sunday, July 26 at 2 pm
Wednesday, July 29 at 2 pm
Friday, July 31 at 4 pm
Sunday, August 2 at 2 pm
Sosnoff Theater
“Botstein, and his annual opera production at Bard, seem more invaluable by the year.” —The New York Times
A hypnotic blend of myth, melodrama, and psychological intrigue, Richard Strauss’s seldom heard The Egyptian Helen (Die ägyptische Helena) receives a lavish, rare U.S. staging at Bard SummerScape.
Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal reimagine the Helen myth, set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, as a tale of doubling: a phantom Helen returns to Troy, while the real, faithful Helen has been spirited away from harm. The vengeful husband, Menelaus, surrenders to love; the unfaithful Helen renews her devotion. The opera unfolds as a rich exploration of the complexities and contradictions of love, sexuality, and marriage.
Director Christian Räth (Meyerbeer’s Le prophète, Strauss’s The Silent Woman, Korngold’s The Miracle of Heliane) returns for his fourth Bard SummerScape to helm a full production of this neglected Strauss masterpiece. In Räth’s visionary staging, the mystical sorceress Aithra becomes the director of Helen and Menelaus’s story, seeing Helen as her alter ego and transforming the opera into a prism of fame, fantasy, and the creation of identity.
Making her SummerScape debut, the “compelling” (The New York Times) soprano Ambur Braid makes her role debut as Helena, joined by SummerScape Opera favorites: the “incredible” (OperaWire) tenor John Matthew Myers (Smetana’s Dalibor) as Menelaus and the “bright and earnest” (The New York Times) soprano Jana McIntyre (Strauss’s The Silent Woman) as Aithra. Anchored by the American Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Maestro Leon Botstein, this production continues Bard’s decades-long tradition of showcasing rare operatic gems with artists of the highest caliber.
The principals are Ambur Braid (soprano) as Helena, wife of Menelaus; John Matthew Myers (tenor) as Menelaus, King of Sparta; Jana McIntyre (soprano) as Aithra, the daughter of an Egyptian King: a sorceress; Blake Denson (baritone) as Altair; and Deborah Nansteel (mezzo-soprano) as the Omniscient Seashell. The creative team is Christian Räth (Stage Direction), Christian Räth and Daniel Unger (Scenic Design), Mattie Ullrich (Costume Design),
Tyler Micoleau (Lighting Design), Elaine J. McCarthy (Projection Design), Catherine Galasso (Choreography), and Brittany Rappise (Hair and Makeup Design).
About Christian Räth
A native of Hamburg, director Christian Räth is renowned throughout Europe, Japan, and the United States. His work takes him to many of the world’s leading opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera New York, San Francisco Opera, Washington National Opera, Wiener Staatsoper, Teatro alla Scala Milan, Opéra national de Paris, New National Theatre Tokyo, and the Royal Opera House London.Recent projects include his debut with Gothenburg Opera directing Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta and the world premiere of Toshio Hosokawa’s new opera Natasha for New National Theatre Tokyo; Meyerbeer’s Le prophète (2024), Strauss’s The Silent Woman (2022), and Korngold’s The Miracle of Heliane (2019) at Bard SummerScape; Der Freischütz and Macbeth at the Wiener Staatsoper; Le Baron Tzigane at the Grand Théâtre de Genève; L’italiana in Algeri at Portland Opera; and the direction and design of Kiss Me, Kate for the Haut école de musique de Genève, in collaboration with the Théâtre du Galpon, Geneva. Räth has conceived and directed several unique historical events in Egypt, including “The Pharaohs’ Golden Parade,” celebrating the journey of 22 royal mummies through the city of Cairo, and the opening ceremony of the antique “Sphinx Road” at Luxor. These productions involved more than a thousand participants and were broadcast worldwide. He was also the artistic director of the “Silver Jubilee” at the Royal Court of Jordan in 2024.
The 36th Bard Music Festival
Mozart and His World
Weekend One: The Perils of Genius
August 7–9
Weekend Two: The Universal Musician
August 13–16
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart: the most celebrated and recognized name in classical music. More has been written about his career and music, more myths spun about his childhood, personality, and death, more films made about his life or using his music than of any other composer. How might we today come to terms with, as Stendhal put it, “the ultimate and lasting effect of Mozart’s music on the human heart?”
Mozart’s shifting but enduring place in our cultural history stems from his expansion of the expressive power and reach of musical ideas and thought, first in the compositions of a child prodigy, and last in the philosophically complex operas written in his prime and the exquisite late chamber music. The 36th Bard Music Festival will confront the many Mozart myths and examine his legacy. Audiences will come into contact with his life and work in the context of the politics and thought of the 18th century in the Habsburg Empire under Maria Theresa and Joseph II, in Salzburg, where he and his father Leopold worked, and in Vienna, where Mozart spent the last decade of his life.
The festival will explore Mozart’s work and life in eleven themed concerts, with orchestral concerts featuring the American Symphony Orchestra and The Orchestra Now, Bard’s unique graduate training orchestra, both led by music director Leon Botstein. As in previous seasons, the Bard Festival Chorale takes part in all choral works under the direction of James Bagwell. Mozart’s music will be heard alongside works by Joseph and Michael Haydn, Antonio Salieri, Johann Christian Bach, Franz Süssmayr, Joseph Eybler, Thomas Attwood, and Marianna Martines, among others. Programs will include popular music, examples of the theater of the day, rarely performed compositions such as the late Masonic Cantata and Davidde Penitente, as well as concertos and symphonies. This summer’s final program, a semi-staged performance of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail)—the opera most performed during his lifetime—features vocal soloists including soprano Jana McIntyre and tenor Minghao Liu.
Full Bard Music Festival programming will be announced at a later date.
The Spiegeltent
Live Music – Performance – DancingJune 26 – August 15
A magnificent Spiegeltent returns to SummerScape for its 19th year. This year’s Spiegeltent programs are curated by Jason Collins, Fisher Center Producer & Spiegeltent Curator. Spiegeltent darling Adrienne Truscott returns as the season’s emcee, and local favorite Andy Monk returns as the host and co-curator of the After Hours series.
Featured acts include the return of favorites Justin Vivian Bond, Martha Redbone, Adrienne Truscott, the Tray Wellington Band, and Chanel Ali, and debuts by BenDeLaCreme, James Austin Johnson, Samora Pinderhughes, Jon Benjamin - Jazz Daredevil, and more.
The beloved Bluegrass on Hudson series returns for a fourth year, guest curated by Ruth Oxenberg and Rob Schumer. This year’s lineup features The Fretliners, The John Hartford Fiddle Tune Project, Darol Anger & Bruce Molsky, Kittel & Co., The Onlies, and Big Richard.
Sumptuous evenings of dazzling performances, drinks, and dancing await!
Full Spiegeltent programming will be announced at a later date.
Special Events
Bard Music Festival Opening Night SocialFriday, August 7 at 5 pm
Manor House
$130
Before the opening night concert, celebrate the official start of the Bard Music Festival at the magnificent and picturesque 1916 Ward Manor House. Take in expansive views of the Catskill Mountains and enjoy a savory spread as the 36th Bard Music Festival, Mozart and His World, kicks off.
Summer Picnic
Saturday, August 15, from 3:30–5:30 pm
Campus Center North
Free; Reservations Required
Gather together for a picnic as Bard SummerScape draws to a close. Nestled perfectly between two Bard Music Festival concerts and before the final Spiegeltent show of the season, the afternoon will include delightful music, good cheer, and picnic meals to order.
Post Date: 02-03-2026