13th Annual Bard Music Festival The 13th season of the Bard Music Festival is an auspicious one; not because of the superstitions surrounding the number 13, but because this is our final summer to present orchestra concerts in the festival tent. We were fortunate with our first festival in 1990 to locate a tent of stretched vinyl that provided acoustical resonance for outdoor concerts, not to mention protection from inclement weather. In one shape or another, we used this style of tent each season thereafter. We did, however, have to learn how to survive hot spells by installing overhead fans and unseasonably cold weather by adding portable heaters. Hurricanes and sudden downpours became another unpredictable obstacle to wrestle with, but throughout all extremes of weather our festival tent held up. At times we thought about giving up the struggle and renting an indoor venue to house the orchestra concerts. But each time we decided to remain with the tent until we had our own concert hall. Perhaps we just didn’t want to leave the Bard campus where it all began, or perhaps we were becoming inured to the rigors of presenting outdoor concerts. Each year our audiences enthusiastically joined in the spirit of these adventures, which included in some seasons fighting off an invasion of mosquitoes, tolerating the accompaniment of chirping crickets, and in one year, enduring the incessant shrill calls of cicadas during their breeding season. But there were some splendid moments as well: the flash of fireflies in the meadow during Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream; a beautiful sunset setting the sky ablaze during Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration; and a cool breeze wafting through the tent as we enjoyed a late afternoon performance of Haydn’s The Seasons. In the woods surrounding the Bard campus, there are many lingering strains of music still echoing from past concerts in the festival tent: resounding crescendos from Brahms’s First Piano Concerto; a quartet of solo voices soaring over the chorus in Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang; lilting waltzes woven throughout Strauss’s Rosenkavalier Suite; solemn choral laments from Dvorák’s Requiem Mass; the magical high-soprano line floating over the orchestra in Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri; haunting arias from Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle; hints of marching band music and hymns throughout Charles Ives’s works; recitatives and courtly arias in Haydn’s L’anima del filosofo; heroic outcries from Tchaikovsky’s Maid of Orleans; thundering choral and orchestral climaxes in Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder; the call to battle and the booming sounds of guns from Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory; and the serene orchestral murmurs rolling throughout Debussy’s La Mer. There have been many poignant farewells in music: to lovers, to forests, to a daughter, and even to an overcoat, but none, so far as we know, to a festival tent. Nevertheless, ours will be an impressive goodbye. The final performance in the festival tent will be Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 ("Symphony of a Thousand"). We decided, as the saying goes, to "pull out all of the stops" and take advantage of our outdoor space for this performance, which requires a large orchestra, soloists, several choruses, and a boy choir. So with this great work of Gustav Mahler, we will leave behind a legacy of 13 years of glorious orchestral sounds in these woods as we move to our new venue in 2003, the Bard Performing Arts Center designed by the renowned American architect, Frank Gehry. In conjunction with the Bard Music Festival this year Bard will be hosting a three-day conference entitled Contested Legacies: A Conference on the German-Speaking Intellectual and Cultural Emigration to the United States and United Kingdom, 1930-45.   back to top