HENRI VIII Comes to Bard SummerScape Next Week

Starting next Friday, July 21, the 20th annual Bard Summerscape presents the first major new American production of Camille Saint-Saëns’s unjustly neglected grand opera Henri VIII (July 21, 23, 26, 28, and 30). The original staging by visionary French director Jean-Romain Vesperini features bass-baritone Alfred Walker, who combines “vocal heft and theatrical intensity” (Wall Street Journal), with the American Symphony Orchestra and Bard Festival Chorale led by festival founder and co-artistic director Leon Botstein, of whose rare concert performance of the opera at SummerScape 2012, the New York Times observed: “Well paced by Mr. Botstein and played with infectious enthusiasm by the American Symphony Orchestra, the music throughout is simply gorgeous.” Botstein will give an Opera Talk before the first Sunday matinee (July 23); the third performance will stream live online (July 26) with an encore presentation three days later (July 29); and there will be a premiere party and intermission toast on the opening night (July 21), with a members’ toast before the final performance (July 30). Also this summer, the 2023 Bard Music Festival, “Vaughan Williams and His World,” presents a rare semi-staged, livestreamed production of Sir John in Love by Ralph Vaughan Williams, starring Craig Colclough, Brandie Sutton, and Sarah Saturnino (Aug 13). Both operas will be mounted in the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center on Bard’s glorious Hudson Valley campus, with chartered coach transportation from New York City for the Sunday matinees on July 23 and 30 (Henri VIII) and August 13 (Sir John).
 
In a June 2023 feature story, Opera News notes: “Every summer since 2003, Bard has presented a fully staged mounting of a seldom-performed work. The list comprises a dazzling series of rarities.” Indeed, last season’s production of Strauss’s The Silent Woman was chosen as one of the “most memorable classical music performances of 2022” by the Boston Globe, confirming SummerScape’s reputation for “essential summertime fare for the serious American opera-goer” (Financial Times). As the New York Times puts it, “Bard has become a haven for important operas.”

Saint-Saëns’s Henri VIII (1883)

Over the course of his long and remarkable career, Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) helped shape the course of French music. Today his operatic reputation rests solely on Samson et Dalila, but during his lifetime Henri VIII (1883) was a resounding success in Paris, London and beyond. Subsequent revivals have been rare, however. Henri VIII only received its U.S. premiere in 1974, and this season’s SummerScape staging marks its first major American production to date. Yet in its depiction of the historic love triangle between the English king, his first wife, and the mistress who became his second, the opera boasts some of Saint-Saëns’s richest orchestration and most exquisite vocal writing. As Gramophone writes: “This work, though very rarely heard, is not only written with outstanding skill, … but has a strong dramatic libretto with firm characterization.” Festival founder Leon Botstein agrees: “Henri VIII really deserves to be in the repertory,” he says. “I regard it as more persuasive, more beautiful, more compelling a story than Samson et Dalila.”

SummerScape’s original production is by French director Jean-Romain Vesperini, whose previous credits include Paris National Opera, Opera Hong Kong, Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre and the Quebec Opera Festival, where his treatment of Gounod’s Faust was “a success and one of the finest presented in recent seasons” (Journal de Québec, Canada). Designed by Alain Blanchot, Henri VIII’s costumes conjure the grandeur of traditional French opera with faithfully reproduced styles from the Tudor period, while Bruno de Lavenère’s minimalist sets help position the opera as psychological drama. Complete with evocative video projections by Studio AE and lighting by Christophe Chaupin, the concept is designed, Vesperini explains, “to develop the audience’s fantasy and imagination.”
 
Last seen at Bard in 2019’s “world-class production” (Opera Wire) of The Miracle of Heliane, Alfred Walker stars in the title role. Known for his “beautiful bass-baritone and physical magnetism” (Opera News), he sings opposite the Catherine d’Aragon of soprano Amanda Woodbury, a Grand Finals Winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions (now known as the Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition), with mezzo-soprano Lindsay Ammann – “a force to be dealt with” (Opera News) – as the beautiful and ambitious Anne Boleyn. Canadian tenor Josh Lovell lends his “warm, liquid voice and easy high notes” (The Guardian) to the role of Don Gómez de Feria, with The Miracle of Heliane’s Kevin Thompson as Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Singing the Duke of Norfolk, Anne’s uncle, is Harold Wilson, who “command[ed] a sonorous bass” (New York Times) in a leading role of 2022’s The Silent Woman.

Vaughan Williams’s Sir John in Love (1928)

The subject of this year’s Bard Music Festival, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) was a great lover of Shakespeare’s work, and it was reportedly “entirely for his own enjoyment” that he based a comic opera on The Merry Wives of Windsor. This was also the inspiration for Verdi’s Falstaff, but unlike the Italian composer, Vaughan Williams had the advantage of writing in English, and his plot and libretto adhere closely to Shakespeare’s original. Despite this, the resulting opera has only rarely been staged, with no UK performances between 1958 and 2006, when the English National Opera gave its first and only presentation of the work; there have been only two student productions in Britain since then, and only four U.S. productions to date. Such neglect reflects no artistic deficiencies, however. Boasting a score rich with folksongs and Elizabethan melodies, including “Lovely Joan” and “Greensleeves,” Sir John in Love features some of Vaughan Williams’s finest writing. As BBC Music observes:

“The score reveals the composer as a master of comic opera, deftly intercutting Shakespeare’s intricate word-play with the chromatically searching manner of works from the 1920s like the Pastoral Symphony or Flos Campi. Everything is drawn together in scintillating style, and the best moments … are from an exceptional vintage in Vaughan Williams’s creativity.”

This year’s Bard Music Festival presents the opera in a semi-staged production by American director Alison Moritz, whose projects have been called “raw, funny, surreal, and disarmingly human” (Opera News). Bass-baritone Craig Colclough reprises his “moving and sympathetic” portrayal of the title role from Arizona Opera, where he demonstrated “exquisite comic timing and … a wide range of dynamics and luminous bronzed vocal tones” (Opera Today). Soprano Brandie Sutton brings her “radiant, agile voice and tender expressive touches” (New York Times) to the role of Anne Page, opposite the Fenton of British-American tenor Joshua Blue, who also appears this season at the Metropolitan Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Houston Grand Opera, and Glimmerglass Festival. Mezzo-soprano Lucy Schaufer, a finalist for the 2023 Royal Philharmonic Society’s Singer of the Year Award, sings Mistress Quickly, with soprano Ann Toomey, whose credits include Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Berlin Philharmonic, as Mistress Page; 2023 Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Grand Finals-winning mezzo-soprano Sarah Saturnino portrays Mistress Ford. Anchored by Botstein, the Bard Festival Chorale, and the American Symphony Orchestra, this rare, livestreamed American presentation of Vaughan Williams’s opera brings this year’s SummerScape and Bard Music Festival to a satisfying close.

Round-trip bus transportation from New York City

Chartered coach transportation from New York City is available for the Sunday matinee performances of Henri VIII (July 23 and 30) and Sir John in Love (Aug 13). This may be ordered online or by calling the box office, and the meeting point for coach pick-up and drop-off is at Lincoln Center, Amsterdam Avenue, between 64th and 65th Streets. More information is available here.

SummerScape tickets

Tickets for mainstage events start at $25. For complete information regarding tickets, series discounts, and more, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call Bard’s box office at (845) 758-7900.