ON AND OFF CAMPUS: CONSERVATORY NOTES

Internal Music, George Condo, 2020 © George Condo, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo by Thomas Barratt

CONSERVATORY NOTES

In pursuit of its commitment to fostering musical and academic excellence in students coming from populations historically underrepresented in the classical music field, the Bard College Conservatory of Music is now offering up to five Inclusive Excellence in Music Scholarships for incoming first years in the undergraduate double-degree program, one for incoming first years in the Graduate Vocal Arts Program, and one for incoming first years in the Graduate Conducting Program. These scholarships, which will cover up to the full cost of tuition and room and board at Bard College for the entirety of the student’s academic career, aim to address inequities in access to higher education in music. In support of this initiative, and others, artist George Condo created a special limited-edition etching that was sold through his gallery, Hauser & Wirth, with all proceeds dedicated to supporting the arts at Bard. “During one of the most challenging times for colleges in the United States, I wanted to provide both funding and inspirational programming for students,” says Condo, whose daughter, Raphaelle, graduated from Bard in 2018. “Bard College is a place where my daughter thrived and one where the arts are central to the student experience.”

The Bard Conservatory is offering a new bachelor of music in voice performance as part of its five-year, dual-degree track for undergraduates. Students will complete two degrees—a BM and a BA in a field other than music. The program’s faculty includes Artistic Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program Stephanie Blythe, Teresa Buchholz, Richard Cox, Lucy Fitz Gibbon MM ’15, Kayo Iwama, Ilka LoMonaco, Rufus Müller, and Erika Switzer. Performance opportunities include work with the Bard Chamber Singers, led by Music Program Director James Bagwell, a fully staged opera workshop at Bard’s Fisher Center, and performance classes led by Müller.

THE ORCHESTRA NOW

Buried Alive, the most recent CD from The Orchestra Now (TŌN) and conductor and music director Leon Botstein, contains three very different pieces written between 1926 and 1928, the years just before the Crash of 1929. In contrast to the emotionally harrowing Lebendig begraben (Buried Alive), which is a setting of 14 poems by 19th-century Swiss poet Gottfried Keller, Arthur Honegger’s Rugby has, as Botstein says, “a sense of humor.” As the name suggests, Rugby is a musical depiction of a rugby match, and without doubt one of the most effective artistic interpretations of a sporting contest ever created. The third work on the disc is the first modern professional recording of the Concerto Grosso by Dimitri Mitropoulos, who is remembered as a great conductor and an ardent protagonist of the new music of his time, but was a fine composer before he abandoned the discipline in his 30s, as this piece—one of his last—ably demonstrates. TŌN was founded by Botstein in 2015 as a graduate program of the College with the goal of making orchestral music relevant to 21st-century audiences by widening the education of younger musicians and their efforts to connect music to life.