#18 - JRL 8184 - JRL Home
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004
From: Emily Darrow <darrow@bard.edu>
Subject: Bard Music Festival: “Shostakovich and His World”

Bard College has announced the second season of its diverse SummerScape festival, featuring an astonishing array of opera, music, theater, dance and film, and the 15th annual Bard Music Festival: “Shostakovich and His World,” in a newly expanded season running from July 8 through August 22. This year’s Bard Music Festival ­ focusing on Russian composer Dmitrii Shostakovich (1906 -1975) ­ will take place over two concentrated three-day weekends between August 13 and 22, with ten concerts ranging from chamber works to full orchestral programs.

SummerScape highlights include Shostakovich’s rarely heard comic opera The Nose (based on a Gogol story) and his only musical, Moscow: Cherry Tree Towers, a Soviet Rent, following the lives of new residents of a Muscovite paradise ­ a communal housing project. Francesca Zambello will direct both works in her double debut at Bard. SummerScape will place a second great Russian creative talent under the magnifying glass this year: Nikolai Gogol (1809 - 52), many of whose extraordinary stories are to be presented in various forms, including performances of his two-act play, The Inspector General, and theatrical versions of his stories The Overcoat and Nevsky Prospekt. SummerScape will also feature a new chamber opera, Guest from the Future, by Mel Marvin; and a Russian film festival featuring films with scores by Shostakovich and stories by Gogol. Among the guest artists will be several companies from St. Petersburg, including the Alexandriinsky Theatre, and an international roster of soloists, chamber musicians, directors, and actors. The American Symphony Orchestra, under its music director, Leon Botstein, is in residence.

SummerScape opens on July 8 with Nikolai Gogol’s classic satire, The Inspector General, hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as “the greatest play written in Russian.” Directed by Valery Fokin, Bard’s four performances ­ in the Sosnoff Theater ­ star the Russian actor Alexei Devotchenko as a penniless rake confused with a government official.

The Festival’s first performance of the Shostakovich opera The Nose will be given on July 28. Francesca Zambello ­ one of opera’s most widely acclaimed directors ­ has recruited singers she has worked with in Russia and elsewhere in Europe for this thrilling new adventure. Famed architect Rafael Viñoly is the set designer for the three-act opera, based on a famous short story by Nikolai Gogol and composed in 1927-28. In this hilarious comic opera, a petty official awakens one morning to find that his nose has disappeared from his face and is parading around town in the uniform of a more senior official. The five performances will be in Russian with English titles in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater, which has received accolades from writers worldwide. A critic for the Los Angeles Times wrote last year, "The 900-seat Sosnoff Theater, in its first outing as an opera house, proved an acoustic jewel with voices and orchestra alike sounding clear and immediate.”

SummerScape’s two other music-theater presentations ­ Shostakovich’s only musical Moscow: Cherry Tree Towers (also directed by Zambello) and the new chamber opera by Mel Marvin, Guest from the Future ­ will be performed in the Fisher Center’s Theater Two. Guest from the Future is based on the true story of a love affair in postwar Leningrad between philosopher Isaiah Berlin and poet Anna Akhmatova. Written by Mel Marvin (music) and Jonathan Levi (libretto), and directed by David Chambers, it is a follow-up to the creative team’s Don Juan in Prague, presented at last year’s inaugural SummerScape. Guest from the Future premieres on July 22, with seven performances to follow. Moscow: Cherry Tree Towers was named after a notorious Moscow housing development described in the Soviet promotional material of its time as offering its inhabitants “paradise.” It will premiere on August 11 with four performances to follow.

"Shostakovich and his World,” the Fifteenth Annual Bard Music Festival, opens on Friday, August 13 in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater, with an 8:00 pm pre-concert talk by Leon Botstein as a prelude to the first concert of the Festival. The opening night concert, Dmitrii Shostakovich: The Character and the Career, presents chamber and solo pieces by the composer, ranging from early piano dances and a jazz suite to songs and a late string quartet.

The Bard Music Festival’s examination of Shostakovich, under the combined artistic directorship of Leon Botstein, Christopher H. Gibbs, and Robert Martin, falls two years before Shostakovich’s centennial, and will cast light on many aspects of the composer’s creative life. Ten concert programs, ranging from solo piano pieces and chamber works to full orchestral programs, will be presented over the Festival’s two weekends, alongside panels and symposia, all designed to bring vividly to life the musical world of Dmitrii Shostakovich.

During Bard SummerScape, many of Shostakovich’s film soundtracks will be heard over a six-week period, when the films for which he composed them will be screened. Also on the program will be filmed stories by Gogol, Soviet comedies, and special film events with readings of poetry by Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Aleksandr Blok.

As in 2003, SummerScape will offer many additional presentations, including late-night cabaret-style performances in its “Nightscape” series on four Saturday evenings, and dramatic performances of Nikolai Gogol’s short stories: The Overcoat by the Bulgarian clown troupe Credo (in English), Nevsky Prospekt by St. Petersburg’s Potudan Theater (in Russian with English surtitles), and the Russian AKHE Theater’s White Cabin (wordless physical theater). Opening night of this group, under the heading “Petersburg Tales ­ Diary of Gogol,” is August 4, with 16 further performances through August 22.

More program details are given below. In the near future, Bard College’s Fisher Center web site will have more complete information and updates on SummerScape. The site will also provide phone numbers, ticket information, and directions for getting to Bard (only 90 minutes north of Manhattan). The SummerScape box office, which begins selling tickets on May 1, 2004, can be reached at (845) 758-7900. Tickets will also be available on the Fisher Center website, www.bard.edu/fishercenter.