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BRINGING THE HEAT
BRINGING THE HEAT
Bard SummerScape and the Bard Music Festival (BMF) continue to connect audiences to powerful, moving, entertaining, and important works of music, opera, dance, and theater that have been unjustly ignored, forgotten, suppressed, neglected, or would not otherwise have existed. All that, along with late-night revelry at the Spiegeltent, enriched and enlivened the Hudson Valley for eight weeks this summer at the Fisher Center.
This year’s opera was the first new American production in almost five decades of Le prophète by Giacomo Meyerbeer, a remarkably topical grand opera in which religion, politics, and power collide. No 19th-century composer of opera was more frequently performed than Meyerbeer, and his third grand opera—despite its recent neglect—remains one of the most successful ever written. Christian Räth, the German director responsible for recent SummerScape stagings of Das Wunder der Heliane and The Silent Woman, created a visionary new production with colorful vocal passages, inventive orchestrations, and a catastrophic end. The New York Times called it, “just ravishing music-making,” while The Wall Street Journal praised Räth’s “astute production” of a “riveting and rousing piece.”
The 34th Bard Music Festival, Berlioz and His World, explored the radical experimentation and uniquely multidisciplinary creativity of a composer who perfectly reflected his milieu, but was also distinctly outside—and certainly before—his time. Hector Berlioz drew music and sound into dialogue with a wide range of cultural, political, scientific, and sociological currents. He was a polarizing figure, seen as a genius by many, criticized by others, and more popular abroad than in his native France, at least while he was alive. With the perspective of history, his importance is clear: According to BMF founder, coartistic director, and conductor Leon Botstein, Berlioz “reinvented concert music as a democratic public theatrical experience.”
