The Bard Music Festival is an annual classical music festival held during the month of August on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
History Founded in 1990, the festival was created with the intention of finding ways to present the history of music in innovative ways to contemporary audiences. To this end, each year the festival selects a single composer to be its main focus and presents performances in tandem with presentations on biographical details on the subject and links to the worlds of literature, painting, theater, philosophy, and politics that would have influenced the life and works of the featured composer. The effort to bridge the worlds of performance and scholarship often results in a variety of concert formats and styles that often depart from the typical recital and concert structure.
Concerts are frequently presented with informative preconcert talks, panel discussions by renowned musicians and scholars, and other special events.
In addition, each season a book of essays, translations, and correspondence relating to the festival’s central figure is published by Princeton University Press. The festival is currently led by Artistic Directors Leon Botstein, and Irene Zedlacher.
Composers featured by year
1990: Johannes Brahms 1991: Felix Mendelssohn 1992: Richard Strauss 1993: Antonín Dvořák 1994: Robert Schumann 1995: Bela Bartok 1996: Charles Ives 1997: Joseph Haydn 1998: Peter IIlich Tchaikovsky 1999: Arnold Schoenberg 2000: Ludwig Van Beethoven 2001: Claude Debussy 2002: Gustav Mahler 2003: Leos Janáček 2004: Dmitrii Shostakovich 2005: Aaron Copland 2006: Franz Liszt 2007: Edward Elgar 2008: Sergey Prokofiev 2009: Richard Wagner 2010: Alban Berg 2011: Jean Sibelius 2012: Camille Saint-Saëns 2013: Igor Stravinsky 2014: Franz Schubert 2015: Carlos Chávez 2016: Giacomo Puccini 2017: Frederic Chopin 2018: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov 2019: Erich Wolfgang Korngold 2020: William Grant Still, Jessie Montgomery, Roque Cordero, Duke Ellington and others - held in September due to COVID-19 2021: Nadia Boulanger 2022: Sergei Rachmaninoff 2023: Vaughan Williams 2024: Hector Berlioz 2025: Bohuslav Martinů
References
External links Official website