Bard Music Festival Explores Life and Times of One of 20th Century’s Greatest Symphonists and Britain’s Foremost Composers in “Vaughan Williams and Hi

 
(May 2023, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.) — This August, the Bard Music Festival returns for its 33rd season, with an intensive two-week exploration of “Vaughan Williams and His World.” In eleven themed concert programs, this examines the great but frequently misunderstood English and Welsh composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, one of the 20th century’s preeminent symphonists, who spearheaded a new British renaissance in music. Through the prism of his life and career, Weekend One contextualizes the composer among his fellow Victorians, Edwardians, and Moderns (Aug 4–6), and Weekend Two explores his role in creating what may be considered A New Elizabethan Age? (Aug 10–13). Complemented by two special events in nearby Rhinebeck, these concerts take place in the stunning Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on Bard College’s idyllic Hudson River campus, and six will also stream live to home audiences worldwide on Upstreaming, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage. For the final concert, chartered coach transportation from New York City will be available (see details below). A centerpiece of the 20th Bard SummerScape festival, the Bard Music Festival represents a highlight of the Fisher Center’s landmark 20th anniversary season, “Breaking Ground.”
 
Since its inception in 1990, the Bard Music Festival has enriched the standard concert repertory with a wealth of important rediscoveries. This is in no small part thanks to its founder and co-artistic director, Leon Botstein. “One of the most remarkable figures in the worlds of arts and culture” (NYC Arts, THIRTEEN/WNET), Botstein serves as music director of both the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) and The Orchestra Now (TON), Bard’s unique graduate training orchestra. Both ensembles perform in the festival, as does the Bard Festival Chorale, which takes part in all choral works under the direction of James Bagwell. As always, this year’s operatic, chamber, and vocal programs will boast a comparably impressive lineup of guest artists, violinist Bella Hristova, tenor Nicholas Phan, bass-baritone Craig Colclough, pianists Danny Driverand Piers Lane, and the Horszowski Trio among them.

Vaughan Williams and His World

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) was one of classical music’s most compelling characters. Convinced that music was for the people, he frequently wrote for amateurs and, despite personal atheism, dedicated years to collecting and arranging hymns. Unlike many of his generation, he never doubted women’s abilities, and many members of his impressive student roster were female. A fervent believer in artists’ moral responsibility, he served as an ambulanceman on the Western Front in World War I and campaigned for the release of interned refugee Jewish musicians in World War II. Today he is recognized as one of the 20th century’s foremost symphonists and as an icon of British identity, whose devotion to the folksongs and Renaissance composers of his homeland helped shape the national sound. Yet there is a tendency to privilege the pastoral and nostalgic elements of his music over the radically unsparing modernism of some of his greatest works, many of which are rarely heard.
 
To explore Vaughan Williams’s life and world in all their complexity, the festival will present a broad sampling of his oeuvre, from such audience favorites as The Lark Ascending and the Tallis Fantasia to his biblical ballet, Job, A Masque for Dancing; his Shakespearean opera, Sir John in Love; and three of his less-frequently programmed symphonies, including the blisteringly uncompromising Fourth. These will be heard alongside music by his teachers Charles Villiers Stanford, C. Hubert Parry, Max Bruch, and Maurice Ravel; his British friends, classmates and other contemporaries, from such luminaries as Gustav Holst, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and Rebecca Clarke to less familiar figures like Edmund Rubbra and Maude Valérie White; his students, including Ivor Gurney, Constant Lambert, Elizabeth Maconchy, and Grace Williams; others he influenced, like Samuel Barber and Michael Tippett; and the Tudor composers he revered, William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons among them.
 
Featuring the newly renovated organ of Rhinebeck’s Episcopal Church of the Messiah, two special events explore “Music for School, Parish, and Home.” Two thought-provoking panel discussions and a series of informative pre-concert talks will illuminate each concert’s themes, and there will be an opening-night social in SummerScape’s beloved Spiegeltent.

Weekend One: Victorians, Edwardians, and Moderns (Aug 4–6)

The festival launches with Program One, “Vaughan Williams: Becoming an English Composer.” Harnessing Bard’s unusual ability to integrate orchestral, choral, vocal, and chamber works within a single event, this concert offers an overview of Vaughan Williams’s long and prolific career, from his early songs and Piano Quintet to his neo-classical D-minor Violin Concerto and famed Tallis Fantasia, which marries folk modality with Elizabethan themes in a stirring evocation of Englishness. As a reminder of the way his contemporaries most often encountered his music, the program will open and close with two of Vaughan Williams’s best-loved hymn settings: “Down Ampney,” named for the village of his birth, and the “Old Hundredth” psalm. A set of variations embodying a potted history of English music, this was written for the coronation of Elizabeth II and sung again five years later at the composer’s own funeral. (This concert will be livestreamed.)
 
Program Two, “Between Two Worlds: London and Berlin,” helps contextualize Vaughan Williams among his mentors and peers, juxtaposing two of his songs with chamber works by C. Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford, his teachers at London’s Royal College of Music, and by fellow folksong-lover Max Bruch, with whom he began lessons while honeymooning in Berlin. Also featured are Vaughan Williams’s contemporaries Ethel Smyth, Frank Bridge, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whom Stanford considered his most gifted pupil, and whose music Vaughan Williams would later champion as a conductor.
 
The second all-Vaughan Williams event of the festival, Program Three, “The Symphony and Composing for the Stage,” comprises three of his mature orchestral works. These were all first completed in the early 1930s, although the dramatically percussive C-major Piano Concerto will be heard in his later arrangement for two pianos. Originally intended for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Job, A Masque for Dancing encapsulates the development of Vaughan Williams’s sound from pastoral to modernist, anticipating his Fourth Symphony. As bold as it is thrilling, this seldom programmed work consolidates the composer’s standing as one of the most important symphonists since Gustav Mahler. (This concert will be livestreamed.)
 
To find his own compositional voice, Vaughan Williams not only embraced the British heritage whose revival he launched but consciously rejected German models. This was especially so in the field of song, where the lied’s influence prevailed. In a concert with commentary – Program Four, “Heirs and Rebels: British Art Song” – Scholar-in-Residence Byron Adams traces the evolution of a uniquely British sound through songs by the once-hugely-popular Maude Valérie White, Liza Lehrmann, and Roger Quilter; tragic figures George Butterworth and Ivor Gurney; occult-obsessed Peter Warlock; BBC music director Arthur Bliss; Vaughan Williams’s woefully underrated students Elizabeth Maconchy and Ina Boyle; and scions of the next generation Benjamin Britten and Gerald Finzi, whose Shakespearean song cycle, Let Us Garlands Bring, was written as a gift to the older composer. Vaughan Williams himself is represented by settings of verse by poets including his second wife, Ursula.
 
Program Five, “Entente Cordiale: Britain and France,” explores efforts to escape the hegemony of German influence by turning instead to a nearer neighbor. An A. E. Housman setting evoking the English countryside, Vaughan Williams’s song cycle On Wenlock Edge paradoxically incorporates techniques learned from Maurice Ravel, and proved a firm favorite with French audiences. Also on the program are piano works by Ravel and Debussy, together with French-inflected piano and chamber works by Arthur Bliss, Frederick Delius, Rebecca Clarke, John Ireland, and Herbert Howells, whose Piano Quartet is one of the great masterworks of British impressionism.
 
The weekend concludes with a concert with commentary. Curated and hosted by Christina Baade, whose publications include the multiple award-winning Victory Through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II, Program Six, “London Calling! Fun in Cockaigne!” offers an entertaining and wholly original tour through half a century of British light music. Spanning the period from pre-World War I music hall to Windrush generation calypso, by way of classics from Ivor Novello, Vera Lynn, Noël Coward, Noel Gay, and many more, this includes selections from Vaughan Williams’s all-but-forgotten operetta The Poisoned Kiss, flanked by examples of the 1920s jazz and tango that helped inspire it. (This concert will be livestreamed.)

Weekend Two: A New Elizabethan Age? (Aug 10–13)

Deeply committed to public service, Vaughan Williams believed “a composer must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community.” Unsurprisingly, then, not all his music was destined for the concert hall. This year, the Bard Music Festival makes its first foray off-campus to date with two special programs of “Music for School, Parish, and Home” in nearby Rhinebeck. Featuring the newly renovated organ of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah, Part One investigates “Music for the Classroom and Parlor” by Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries, including his classmate and lifelong friend, Gustav Holst, and French-Canadian student, Jean Coulthard. Next, Part Two, “The Anglican Choral Tradition,” surveys 350 years of English choral music in the ecclesiastical environment for which it was written. Interspersed with organ works by Vaughan Williams and Ethel Smyth, this choral program features composers ranging from William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons to Britten and Howells.
 
Program Seven, “The Lark Ascending: British Music for Chamber Orchestra,” celebrates the flowering of British orchestral writing in the first half of the last century. Vaughan Williams was not alone in drawing inspiration from his homeland’s Tudor roots; Warlock’s Capriol Suite is a charming Renaissance dance pastiche, while the final movement of Holst’s St. Paul’s Suite plays on the famous “Greensleeves” melody. Also on the program are works by Elgar, Delius, and under-sung Welsh composer Grace Williams, a star student of Vaughan Williams, who is himself represented by three very different works. Scored for harp and strings, his Five Variants of “Dives and Lazarus” take their modal sonorities from the haunting folk melody that inspired them. Meditative and impressionistic, with pentatonic patterns that set its solo violin free to soar, The Lark Ascending is now in its second decade at the top of Classic FM’s annual audience poll. By contrast, Flos Campi is seldom programmed and persistently misunderstood; scored for solo viola, chorus, strings, and brass, this wordless setting of erotic verses from the biblical Song of Solomon is lush, sensuous, and boldly bitonal. (This concert will be livestreamed.)
 
The World War II years come into focus in Program Eight, “The Islands and the Continent.” Featured composers include Northern Ireland’s Howard Ferguson; Vaughan Williams’s student Gordon Jacob and close associate Edmund Rubbra; his Hungarian counterpart in folksong collection Béla Bartók; and Egon Wellesz and Robert Müller-Hartmann, two of the Jewish refugees interned as “Alien Musicians” whose release he secured as chair of a dedicated Home Office committee. Both he and Arnold Bax dedicated works to prominent British pianist and ardent Zionist Harriet Cohen, of whose Bach interpretations and arrangements Vaughan Williams was especially fond. The concert closes with an account of his own Second String Quartet, which borrows from his score for the wartime propaganda film 49th Parallel.
 
The 1950s saw an outpouring of new music from the aging Vaughan Williams. Marking the American Symphony Orchestra’s first concert of the festival, Program Nine, “A New Elizabethan Age?” presents two of his late symphonies alongside other key orchestral works of the period. While drawing on his own incidental music for the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic, the Sinfonia Antartica, his Seventh Symphony, is nonetheless a fully realized modern masterpiece. Scored for vast forces including bells, organ, wind machine, and wordless women’s chorus, this darkly atmospheric work is adventurous both timbrally and harmonically. Brighter in tone yet no less sonically bold, the vividly orchestrated Eighth Symphony was recognized with a New York Critics Circle Award. These late symphonies share the program with Proud Thames, Elizabeth Maconchy’s commanding, winning entry to a Coronation Overture-writing competition; the sparkling Partita for Orchestra by William Walton, then emerging as one of the next generation’s leading lights; and Andante festivo, an earlier work by Jean Sibelius, to whom Vaughan Williams had dedicated his Fifth Symphony and, like many British composers, felt indebted. (This concert will be livestreamed.)
 
Vaughan Williams’s own influence has been similarly far-reaching and profound. From his passionate belief in the social role of the artist to his distinctive textures, soundscapes, and rich post-tonal language, he has inspired generations of younger composers, both in Britain and beyond. The festival’s final chamber concert, Program Ten, “Vaughan Williams’s Legacy,” offers stylistically diverse works by three more of his illustrious students: Constant Lambert, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, and the seldom-programmed Ruth Gipps; the Serenade for String Quartet by Samuel Barber, whom Vaughan Williams befriended in America; and the First Piano Sonata by Michael Tippett, for whom Vaughan Williams campaigned when the younger composer was jailed as a conscientious objector, despite emphatically not sharing his pacifism. The concert concludes with Vaughan Williams’s last major instrumental work, the A-minor Violin Sonata; a powerful example of his late modernism, the sonata will receive the first performance to date of its newly corrected score at Bard.
 
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the First Folio, the first published collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Vaughan Williams was a great lover of the poet’s work, and it was reportedly “entirely for his own enjoyment” that he based a comic opera on The Merry Wives of Windsor. Shakespeare’s comedy 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 2005, and no U.S. premiere until 2015. 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:

Program Eleven, “Vaughan Williams and Shakespeare: Sir John in Love,” 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). Anchored by the American Symphony Orchestra, it is with this rare American presentation of Vaughan Williams’s opera that the 2023 Bard Music Festival draws to a satisfying close.(This concert will be livestreamed.)

Supplementary events and companion book

Besides the eleven concert programs and two special events, there will be two free panel discussions: “Composer and Nation” and “The Artist in Time of War.” These will be supplemented by informative pre-concert talks – all free to ticket-holders – to illuminate some of the individual programs’ themes. Bard SummerScape also presents the first major American production of Saint-Saëns’s Henri VIII, a French grand opera set in Tudor England (July 21–30).
 
Since its founding, each Bard Music Festival has been accompanied by the publication of a companion volume of new scholarship and interpretation, with essays and translated documents relating to the featured composer and their world. Published by the University of Chicago Press, Vaughan Williams and His World is edited by Bard’s 2023 Scholars-in-Residence: Byron Adams, a contributor to both the Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams and Vaughan Williams Studies, and Daniel M. Grimley, Professor of Music at the University of Oxford.

Round-trip bus transportation from New York City

Chartered coach transportation from New York City is available for the festival finale, Program Eleven (Aug 13). This may be ordered online or by calling the box office at 845-758-7900, and the meeting point for pick-up and drop-off is at Lincoln Center on Amsterdam Avenue, between 64th and 65th Streets. More information is available here.

SummerScape tickets

Tickets for mainstage events start at $25 and livestreams are $20. For complete information regarding tickets, series discounts, and more, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call Bard’s box office at (845) 758-7900.

The Fisher Center’s 20th Anniversary Season is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, Felicitas S. Thorne, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members, the Ettinger Foundation, the Thendara Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Fisher Center LAB has received funding from members of the Live Arts Bard Creative Council, the Lucille Lortel Foundation, and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman ’06 through the March Forth Foundation.
   The 2023 Bard Music Festival has received support from the Vaughan Williams Foundation.

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