35th Bard Music Festival

Martinů and His World

"Part boot camp for the brain, part spa for the spirit" —The New York Times

The Bard Music Festival returns with an intensive two-week exploration of Martinů and His World. In eleven themed concerts featuring its boldest and most adventurous programming to date, the festival’s 35th season examines the life and times of Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959), one of the most fascinating and prolific composers of the 20th century, whose music is nonetheless largely unfamiliar to U.S. audiences today. 

Schedule Of Events:
10:00 am - Panel One - Why Martinů: Understanding Classical Music, Past and Future
A panel discussion and Q&A with Christopher H. Gibbs, moderator; Michael Beckerman; Leon Botstein.

Free and open to the public.

Location: Olin Hall

1:30 pm - Program Two - The French Connection

Martinů came of age as a composer in the musical melting pot of Paris, where his Czech influences would absorb more international ones. This program examines the worlds that shaped him, contextualizing the composer among his teachers and peers. These include Jaroslav Řídký, with whom he had played in the Czech Philharmonic, and their teacher Josef Suk, whose youthful yet confident First Piano Quartet is dedicated to Suk’s own teacher (and soon-to-be father-in-law), Antonín Dvořák. Two of Martinů’s earliest Parisian works—the ragtimey Foxtrot and assured First Piano Trio—will be heard alongside chamber works by his teacher Albert Roussel, one of the most prominent French composers of the interwar years; the Polish émigré Alexandre Tansman, like Martinů a leading light of the so-called École de Paris; and their elder luminary Maurice Ravel, whose writing would influence the Czech composer’s string quartets.

Program
1 pm - Preconcert talk: Byron Adams
1:30 pm - Performance: Taylor Raven, mezzo-soprano; Brandon Patrick George, flute; Thomas English, bassoon; Michael Stephen Brown, Danny Driver, & Erika Switzer, piano; Luosha Fang, violin; and others

Jaroslav Řídký (1897–1956)
Alla Polka (1933)

Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959)
String Trio No. 1, H136 (1923)

Alexandre Tansman (1897–1986)
Bassoon Sonatina (1956)

Bohuslav Martinů
Flute Sonata, H306 (1945)
Foxtrot for piano, H126b (1920)

Albert Roussel (1869–1937)
Jazz dans la nuit, Op. 38 (1929)

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)
Violin Sonata No. 2 in G Major (1927)

Josef Suk (1874–1935)
Piano Quartet No. 1 in A Minor, Op. 1 (1891)

Location: Olin Hall

7:00 pm - Program Three - Music and Freedom

Martinů’s life was upended by the Nazi invasion, but his compatriot Erwin Schulhoff, a Jewish Communist, suffered the worse fate of dying in a concentration camp. Drawing on influences from neoclassicism to jazz, Schulhoff’s commanding Second Symphony opens this program, the festival’s first all-orchestral concert.

Martinů’s masterly and original Fourth Piano Concerto, “Incantation,” was dedicated to his great friend and fellow exile, the concert pianist – and subsequent mentor to Leon Botstein – Rudolf Firkušný, whose own Piano Concertino receives just its third performance to date. Two more of Martinů’s own works complete the program: the Memorial to Lidice, a searing symphonic response to the Nazis’ annihilation of a Czech village, and his Sixth and final Symphony (Fantaisies symphoniques). Written to celebrate the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 75th anniversary, this was recognized with the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award and represents one of the pinnacles of his work in America.

Program
6 pm - Preconcert talk: Christopher H. Gibbs
7 pm - Performance: Jeonghwan Kim & Piers Lane, piano; The Orchestra Now, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director

Erwin Schulhoff (1894–1942)
Symphony No. 2 (1932)

Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959)
Piano Concerto No. 4, “Incantation,” H358 (1956)
Memorial to Lidice, H296 (1943)

Rudolf Firkušný (1912–94)
Piano Concertino (1929)

Bohuslav Martinů
Symphony No. 6 (Fantaisies symphoniques), H343 (1951–53)

Location: Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater

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