2014 Bard SummerScape and the 25th Anniversary Bard Music Festival

The roots of Austro-German Romanticism will be explored at the 2014 annual Bard SummerScape festival, which once again offers a sensational summer of music, opera, theater, dance, film, and cabaret, keyed to “Schubert and His World,” the theme of the 25th anniversary season of the world-renowned Bard Music Festival. Held in the Frank Gehry–designed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on Bard College’s idyllic Hudson River campus, the seven-week festival opens on June 27 with the first of three performances of Proscenium Works: 1979–2011 by the Trisha Brown Dance Company, and closes on August 17 with the conclusion of the Bard Music Festival. Complementing the Bard Music Festival’s exploration of “Schubert and His World” are SummerScape highlights from some of the great Viennese composer’s most important contemporaries. These include the first American revival in 100 years of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Euryanthe, as well as a single, semi-staged performance of Schubert’s rarely performed opera Fierrabras; the world premiere theater production of Love in the Wars, an adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea by Man Booker Prize–winning novelist John Banville; and a film series titled Schubert and the Long 19th Century. Together, SummerScape’s offerings help celebrate the silver jubilee of the Bard Music Festival—dubbed “part boot camp for the brain, part spa for the spirit” by the New York Times—which has, since its founding in 1990, done so much to revitalize the classical concert experience.

For more information, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call 845-758-7900.