Bard Music Festival's 30th Anniversary Season Explores Life and Times of Korngold – Architect of the Hollywood Sound

This summer, the Bard Music Festival celebrates its 30th anniversary season with a two-week, in-depth exploration of "Korngold and His World." In twelve themed concert programs, complemented by pre-concert lectures, a film screening, panel discussions, and expert commentary, Bard examines the life and career of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), the under-sung yet hugely influential composer whose lush Romanticism would come to define the quintessential Hollywood sound. Offering an immersion in the worlds he straddled, first as a classical prodigy in fin-de-siècle Vienna and then as a prime mover in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Weekend One addresses Korngold and Vienna (August 9-11), and Weekend Twoinvestigates Korngold in America (August 16-18). Enriched by a wealth of compositions by Korngold's predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, all events take place in the stunning Frank Gehry-designed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on Bard College's idyllic Hudson River campus. There, as in previous years, the Bard Music Festival is set to provide the creative inspiration for Bard SummerScape 2019 and to prove itself once again "the summer's most stimulating music festival" (Los Angeles Times). Click here to see the only surviving footage of Korngold playing his own music.

In the three decades since its inception, the Bard Music Festival has become synonymous with a new kind of concert experience, one that provides a "rich web of context" (New York Times) for a full appreciation of each composer's inspirations, significance, and legacy. To date, the festival has illuminated the worlds of Brahms, Mendelssohn, Richard Strauss, Dvo?ák, Schumann, Bartók, Ives, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, Schoenberg, Beethoven, Debussy, Mahler, Janá?ek, Shostakovich, Copland, Liszt, Elgar, Prokofiev, Wagner, Berg, Sibelius, Saint-Saëns, Stravinsky, Schubert, Carlos Chávez, Puccini, Chopin, and Rimsky-Korsakov. In 2020, to launch its fourth decade, Bard looks forward to celebrating "Nadia Boulanger and Her World."

Bard's emphasis on thematic programming and its willingness to vary the traditional concert format, sometimes integrating orchestral, choral, solo, and chamber works within a single event, enables audiences to experience afresh the power of well-known works while discovering less familiar ones for the first time. Since its founding by Leon Botstein in 1990, the festival has succeeded in enriching the standard concert repertory with a wealth of important rediscoveries; as the New York Times points out, "wherever there is an overlooked potential masterpiece, Leon Botstein is not too far behind."

"One of the most remarkable figures in the worlds of arts and culture" (THIRTEEN/WNET), Botstein serves as music director of both the American Symphony Orchestra, andThe Orchestra Now (T?N), a unique graduate training orchestra designed to help a new generation of musicians break down barriers between modern audiences and orchestral music of past and present. Under his leadership, both ensembles perform in the music festival each season, and the American Symphony Orchestra also anchors the annual staged opera. As in previous seasons, the Bard Festival Chorale will take part in all choral works under the leadership of James Bagwell, and this year's chamber and vocal programs will boast a comparably impressive roster of guest artists.

For more information visit: https://fishercenter.bard.edu/bmf/

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