If you are disinclined to cave in to the barrage of mind-softening entertainment that marks the summer months—cinema blockbusters and beach novels, anyone?—you are not alone. (In a woeful minority, indeed, but not alone.)
The annual SummerScape and Bard Music Festival (July 5 through August 18) champion the needs of the unapologetic egghead. For the 2013 season, Bard College unveils its seven-week schedule of theatre, film, opera, dance, classical music, discussions, and Spiegeltent cabaret for those who feel that the only proper response to the sweltering months is cerebral defiance.
Each year, Bard selects an avatar of the classical music world, honors him by reviving his works and then augments the schedule with a panoply of complementary pieces by the legend's contemporaries, mentors and protégés. This year, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), the Russian composer who bucked musical convention with his audacious Firebird, The Nightingale, and The Tale of the Soldier, achieving global fame, is canonized with stagings of his signature and lesser-known pieces alike.
A genre-smashing exploration of Stravinsky's 1913 masterwork, Rite of Spring, a collaboration between choreographer Bill T. Jones and director Anne Bogart, marks the upstart ballet's centenary. "A Rite" (July 6-7) will be performed by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and SITI Company.
When it comes to dysfunctional families, reality TV shows will always pale in the baleful face of "Oresteia," the Greek tragedy by Aeschylus. SummerScape will present the United States stage première of an operatic reimagining of the bloody tale of the House of Atreus, written in the 1890s by Russian composer Sergey Taneyev, a contemporary of Stravinsky (July 26-August 4).
Director Thaddeus Strassberger, the fearless wunderkind who strafed previous SummerScapes with "Les Huguenots" (2009), "Der Ferne Klang" (2010), and "Le roi malgré lui" (2012), reaffirms his penchant for a good theatrical challenge with this neglected epic, his first opera in Russian. (Strassberger directs his foreign cast through an interpreter.)
The director told Chronogram last year that he wants every opera he directs to be "an immersive experience. I like to create a whole world that you can live in for the few hours that you're in the opera house."
For "Oresteia," Strassberger, working with set designer Madeleine Boyd and costume designer Mattie Ulrich, both frequent collaborators, has created a cultural mash-up onstage that deftly melds echoes of ancient Greece and turn-of-the-century Russia—the latter as a nod to the composer. The action of the opera takes place in a crumbling Russian palace, modeled after the dilapidated Baron Steiglitz palace in St. Petersburg. (Strassberger and Boyd made a pilgrimage to the structure last autumn for inspiration, at the behest of the production's music director Leon Botstein.) Ulrich's costumes depict the "visual harmonies between the silhouettes of the ancient Greeks" and the Russians of Taneyev's era, the director said.
The music, set, and lights also echo the mélange. The result is not only historically accurate but it buttresses the main concept: "That we're looking at a classical story set in ancient Greece through the lens of the 1890s to mean something to us today," Strassberger says. "We're sort of dealing with these three time periods all the time that end up having their own universal, classical truth on top of them."
There is ample reason why Taneyev's composition was criticized at its première, and soon fell into obscurity, Strassberger says. His depiction of a regime in disarray was an unwelcome entertainment to a Soviet government that preferred to see fiercely nationalistic pieces performed. Appealing propaganda were more likely to burnish their reputations. Taneyev, however, anticipated the gathering clouds that would lead to the Russian Revolution of 1917. "[W]e're definitely bringing those things to the forefront in our production," Strassberger says. "We feel like we're at the cusp of a regime change or in a sort of new world order. What's happening at the end of 'Oresteia' is the old system of justice has been replaced with a new one, completely different in its moral underpinnings and legal systems are changing."
Devil Went Down to MoscowOne of Russian literature's best-known and best-loved works, The Master and Margarita, has been adapted incessantly. In the past few years, it has been transformed into a film, television, ballet, and an animated cartoon.
"In Moscow, last year alone, there were 12 different stage adaptations of it," said Gideon Lester, Director of Bard's Theater Programs and the co-writer of the adaptation that will be staged at SummerScape. (This is the first American staging in two decades, due to legal issues.)
The ferocity of Russian affection for the work, a fantasia that includes the devil, Pontius Pilate, a comely witch, and a chess-playing, vodka-drinking cat, is all the more amazing when one learns of the book's history. It was written over many years in the 1930s by Mikhail Bulgakov, a writer and playwright so valued by the government that he was kept under a form of house arrest for his entire life. (His contemporary Stravinsky triumphed against Stalin's government and left Russia.) The Master and Margarita, Lester says, is an unrestrained and bilious satire about the Soviet regime, but at once a sobering meditation on free will and responsibility. "The novel is just extraordinary," Lester says. "Incredibly imaginative, fantastical, colorful, serious but also whimsical."
The Master and Margarita languished during decades of suppression by a totalitarian government. With good reason: Bulgakov depicts Moscow as a city teeming with corruption and violence.
The book was not published until 1967, and only then in an expurgated version. It would be several more years before Bulgakov's soaring, multi-century epic—echoing the absurdist works of Gogol and Kafka, Lester observes—would be fully restored, offering readers "a sense of torture and joy, darkness and light simultaneously."
Lester co-wrote the stage adaptation with János Szász, who directs the Bard production. The celebrated Hungarian stage and film director had already staged two previous productions of Bulgakov's novel at the Hungarian National Theatre in Budapest and Moscow Art Theatre. Lester, who first worked with Szász in 1999 on a production of Brecht's "Mother Courage" at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, calls his collaborator a genius.
"He knows a lot about what happens when you try to recreate aspects of the novel on the stage in time and space."
In the six months they worked on the adaptation, Lester traveled to Budapest to discuss the novel with Szász. Ultimately, they built the new adaptation on the foundation of the director's previous stagings, augmented by several translations of the novel that Lester drew from. Even weeks before rehearsals, he said, the artists continue to discuss the text and alter it in ways. "There's always a lively debate."
The Master and Margarita lends itself vividly to the stage, in part because of its grandiose flourishes and the fact that much of the central action takes place in a theater. At the same time, adaptations are a challenge because the source material runs 600 pages. Szász and Lester have had to jettison certain well-loved scenes. "The job is not a slavish reproduction of Bulgakov's novel onstage," Lester said. "For that, I would say, there is no point; you may as well go read the novel. We have to find something that has a theatrical coherence and logic."
Hall of Mirrors
SummerScape also offers refuge for the unbridled hedonist at Spiegeltent, the mirrored pavilion showcasing cabaret, jazz, comedy and entertainment that may kindly be termed bawdy. Performances run from July 5 through August 18 and include Manhattan avant-garde darlings John Kelly and Justin Vivian Bond, the acerbic Sandra Bernhard, Theo Bleckmann singing Kate Bush, Marianne Solivan's tribute to Julie London, jazz of the Parisian 1920s by The Hot Sardines, and indie rockers Buke and Gase with Sara Neufeld from Arcade Fire. The Bindlestiff Family Cirkus offers Kinder Spiegel shows for precocious tykes.
Cinema in Exile
Stravinsky's influence was no less than global; his years of musical exploration as an expatriate in Switzerland, France, and the United States nurtured his legendary status. The impact of his years abroad are echoed through film in a SummerScape festival formidably titled "Stravinsky's Legacy and Russian Émigré Cinema" (July 12 to August 3).
Richard I. Suchenski, Bard's Assistant Professor in Film and Electronic Arts, curated the two-part series to include a retrospective of Russian exile filmmaking in France during the 1920s and 1930s, as well as an inventory of post-World War II cinematic pieces that responded to Stravinsky's work. "In a few cases, that had to do largely with the strategic use of a particular piece of music (The Truth) or a certain approach to sound and music (Rapt), he says. "With a film like the great L'inhumaine, that had to do with both a hybrid modernist aesthetic and the restaging of the première of "Rite of Spring."
While one might expect corrosive satires from Russian émigrés, denouncing their former homeland, Suchenski stressed that political homogeneity is not the series' intention. "There is no single, unifying party line in the program; some of the films were made by left-leaning directors, some by conservatives, many by filmmakers whose politics are hard to pin down," he says. "The New Gentlemen is a fascinating treatment of French politics in the 1920s and Jean Renoir's Gorky adaptation The Lower Depths was one of the key films of the Popular Front. Of the later films, [Godard's] Pierrot le fou has always been seen as something of a landmark in its fusion of art and politics, and I think that is also true, in a very different way, of Chabrol's La Cérémonie."
Of the 23 films showcased in 35mm, only three are available on DVD. Live piano will accompany most of the silent films, and prints on loan from the Cinémathèque Française prints utilized a modern process that recreates the effect of 1920s-era color tinting.
Bard SummerScape 2013 runs July 5 through August 19 at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson. (845) 758-7900; Fishercenter.bard.edu.