Bard SummerScape Announces 2012 Season

Culture at the crossroads in Belle Époque France will be explored at the ninth annual Bard SummerScape festival, which once again features what's being described as "a sumptuous tapestry of music,opera, theater, dance, film, and cabaret, keyed to the theme of the 23^rd annual Bard Music Festival."

Presented in the striking Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on Bard College’s bucolic Hudson River campus, the seven-week festival opens on July 6 with the first of three performances by France’s Compagnie Fêtes Galantes, and closes on August 19 with a party in Bard’s beloved Spiegeltent, which returns for the full seven weeks. This year’s Bard Music Festival explores “Saint-Saëns and His World,” and some of the great French composer’s most innovative compatriots provide other SummerScape highlights, including Emmanuel Chabrier’s opéra-comique The King In Spite of Himself in a first staged revival of the original 1887 version; Molière’s final comedy of manners, The Imaginary Invalid (1673); and a film festival, “France and the Colonial Imagination.”  Together, Bard’s offerings present a vivid portrait of a dazzlingly creative and colorful era in European history: a Golden Age of promise and possibility that came to end with the tragedy of World War I.

For more information, visit the festival web site at fishercenter.bard.edu/summerscape/2012.

Tickets for all SummerScape events go on sale to the public on February 20, 2012, but those who register early as “e-Members” will have the early-bird’s choice of the best seats and also receive regular news and updates.