The Bard Music Festival returns for its 33rd season with an exploration of the life and work of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), one of the greatest symphonists of the 20th century.

Few figures have had such a formative and protean influence on their musical environment as the British composer. With an oeuvre that ranges from songs and hymns to opera, film music, and full-scale orchestral and choral works and includes popular works such as the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and The Lark Ascending as well as scores of uncompromising modernity, Vaughan Williams’s voice defined an era. The festival will explore the full scope of his work and set it in the context of his politics and the culture of the time.

Schedule:

August 4, 2023

5:00pm: Bard Music Festival Opening Night Social - Fisher Center, Spiegeltent

Celebrate the Festival with friends, old and new, and enjoy craft cocktails and local fare in a magical setting.

7:00pm: Program One - Vaughan Williams: Becoming an English Composer - Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater

Launching the 33rd Bard Music Festival, Program One harnesses 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.

performance with commentary by Leon Botstein; with the Horszowski Trio and guests; William Ferguson, tenor; Theo Hoffman, baritone; Renée Anne Louprette, organ; Grace Park, violin; Sun-Ly Pierce, mezzo-soprano; Brandie Sutton, soprano; Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, music director; The Orchestra Now, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)
“Down Ampney (Come Down, O Love Divine)” from The English Hymnal (1906)
Quintet for piano and strings in C minor (1903)
Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis (1910)
Concerto in D minor for violin and strings (1925)
Serenade to Music (1938)
O taste and see (1953)
Songs

Arr. Ralph Vaughan Williams
Selections from Five English Folk Songs (1913)
“Old Hundredth Psalm Tune” (1953)

August 5, 2023

10:00am: Panel One - Composer and Nation -  Olin Hall

A panel discussion and Q&A with Richard Aldous (moderator) Leon Botstein, Deborah Nord, and Eric Saylor.

1:30pm: Program Two - Between Two Worlds: London and Berlin - Olin Hall

Program Two contextualizes 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 in this program 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.

1pm: Preconcert Talk: Eric Saylor
Performance: Ariel Quartet; Michael Stephen Brown, piano; Luosha Fang, viola; Horszowski Trio; Kayo Iwama, piano; Todd Palmer, clarinet; Sun-Ly Pierce, mezzo-soprano

C. Hubert Parry (1848–1918)

Suite No. 1, for violin and piano (1907)

Max Bruch (1838–1920)

Romance, Op. 85, for viola and piano (1911)

Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924)

Piano Trio No. 3 in A minor, “Per aspera ad astra” (1918)

Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)

Sarabande in D minor from Four Dances for piano (1880)

Ralph Vaughan WIlliams (1872–1958)

Silent Noon (1904)
Orpheus and His Lute (1904)

Frank Bridge (1879–1941)

Cherry Ripe for string quartet (1916)
Sir Roger de Coverley, “Christmas Dance” for string quartet (1922)       

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1874–1912)

Clarinet Quintet, Op. 10 (1895)

8:00pm: Program Three - The Symphony and Composing for the Stage - Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater

Program Three comprises three of Vaughan Williams’s 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.

7 pm Preconcert Talk: Philip Rupprecht
Orchestral Performance: Danny Driver and Piers Lane, piano; The Orchestra Now, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director; Joshua Thorson, video design (plus livestream)

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

Job, A Masque for Dancing (1930)
Concerto in C, for two pianos and orchestra (1931, rev. 1947)
Symphony No. 4 in F Minor (1934)

August 6, 2023

10:00am: Program Four - Heirs and Rebels: British Art Songs - Olin Hall

Program Four 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.

performance with commentary by Byron Adams; with Tyler Duncan, baritone; Maximillian Jansen, tenor; Katherine Lerner Lee, soprano; Hailey McAvoy, mezzo-soprano; Kayo Iwama and Erika Switzer, piano

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958

Selections from Songs of Travel (1906), Four Poems by Fredegond Shove (1925), and Four Last Songs (publ. posthumously, 1958)

Maude Valérie White (1855–1937)

“Last Year” from Two Songs (1900)

Liza Lehmann (1862–1918)

Evensong (1916)

Roger Quilter (1877–1953)

Love’s Philosophy (1904)

Peter Warlock (1894–1930)

My Own Country (1927)
Pretty Ring Time (1925)

George Butterworth (1885–1916)

Selections from Six Songs from “A Shropshire Lad” (1912)  

Ivor Gurney (1890–1937)

Selections from Five Elizabethan Songs (1912)

Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–94)

Ophelia’s Song (1929)

Ina Boyle (1889–1967)

The Stolen Child (1925)

Benjamin Britten (1913–76)

Selections from Winter Words, Op. 52 (1953)

Gerald Finzi (1901–56)

Let Us Garlands Bring, Op. 18 (1942)

1:30pm: Program Five - Entente Cordiale: Britain and France -  Olin Hall

Program Five 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.

1pm preconcert talk: Daniel M. Grimley
performance: Ariel Quartet; Michael Stephen Brown, piano; Danny Driver, piano; Luosha Fang, viola; Andrey Gugnin, piano; Piers Lane, piano; Nicholas Phan, tenor

John Ireland (1879–1962)

Decorations (1912–13)

Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979)

Morpheus (1917)

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)

“La vallée des cloches” from Miroirs (1904–05)

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

On Wenlock Edge (1909)  

Claude Debussy (1862–1918)

Selections from Préludes, Book II (1912–13)

Frederick Delius (1862–1934)

Violin Sonata No. 2 (1923)

Arthur Bliss (1891–1975)

The Rout Trot (1927)

Herbert Howells (1892–1983)

Piano Quartet in A minor, Op. 21 (1915, rev. 1936)

5:00pm: Program Six - London Calling! Fun in Cockaigne! - Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater

Program Six offers an entertaining and wholly original tour through half a century of British light music with a commentary by Christina Baade, whose publications include the multiple award-winning Victory Through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II. 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.

Performance with commentary by Christina Baade; with Martin Luther Clark, tenor; Theo Hoffman, baritone; Sun-Ly Pierce, mezzo-soprano; Ann Toomey, soprano; Bard Festival Ensemble; and others

A celebration of Music Hall and pop traditions from Gilbert and Sullivan to the Beatles, with works by Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900), Roger Quilter (1877–1953), Percy Grainger (1882–1961), Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Lord Berners (1883–1950), Eric Coates (1886–1957), Ivor Novello (1893–1951), Noël Coward (1899–1973), Arthur Benjamin (1893–1960), and others

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

From The Poisoned Kiss (1927–29; rev.)

7:00pm: Special Event - Music for Parish, Home, and School - Part I - Church of the Messiah, Rhinebeck

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)
Six Studies on English Folksongs (1926)
Household Music (1941)

Jean Couthard (1908–2000)
Sonata, for oboe and piano (1947)

Songs and hymns by Edward Elgar (1858–1934), Gustav Holst (1874–1934), Martin Shaw (1875–1958), Frank Bridge (1879–1941), John Ireland (1879­–1962), and Herbert Howells (1892–1983)

The Organ
The organ at the Church of the Messiah was installed in 1923 by the celebrated E.M. Skinner Company of Boston. The company, which had a reputation for creating instruments of superb quality and great tonal beauty, built organs for prominent churches and universities, including both the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and St. Thomas Church in New York. A gift to the parish by Captain Vincent Astor, the organ has just returned to the church following a major reconditioning by Quimby Pipe Organs of Warrensburg, Missouri.

August 11, 2023

3:00pm: Special Event - Music for Parish, Home, and School - Part II -  Church of the Messiah, Rhinebeck

Performance with Commentary

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)
Mass in G Minor (1922); from Three Preludes on Welsh Hymn Tunes (1920); Lord, Thou Hast Been Our Refuge (1921)

Benjamin Britten (1913–75)
Rejoice in the Lamb (1943)

Motets, hymns, and organ music by Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924), Ethel Smyth (1858–1944), Charles Wood (1866–1924), Healey Willian (1880–1968), Herbert Howells (1892–1983), and Herbert Murrill (1909–52)

The Organ
The organ at the Church of the Messiah was installed in 1923 by the celebrated E.M. Skinner Company of Boston. The company, which had a reputation for creating instruments of superb quality and great tonal beauty, built organs for prominent churches and universities, including both the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and St. Thomas Church in New York. A gift to the parish by Captain Vincent Astor, the organ has just returned to the church following a major reconditioning by Quimby Pipe Organs of Warrensburg, Missouri.

8:00pm: Program Seven - The Lark Ascending: British Music for Small Orchestra - Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater

Program Seven 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.

7:30pm Preconcert Talk: Imani Mosley
Performance: Luosha Fang, viola; Bella Hristova, violin; members of the Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director; The Orchestra Now, conducted by James Bagwell and Zachary Schwartzman

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

Five Variants of “Dives and Lazarus” (1939)

Edward Elgar (1858–1934)

Serenade for Strings, Op. 20 (1896)

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

Flos Campi (1925)

Grace Williams (1906–77)

Elegy for String Orchestra (1936, rev. 1940)

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

The Lark Ascending (1914, orch. 1921)

Peter Warlock (1894–1930)

Capriol Suite (1926)

Frederick Delius (1862–1934)

Two Aquarelles (1932)

Gustav Holst (1874–1934)

St. Paul’s Suite, Op. 29, No.2 (1913)

August 12, 2023

10:00am: Panel Two - The Artist in Time of War -  Olin Hall

A panel discussion and Q&A with Ian Buruma (moderator) Tim Barringer, Daniel Goldmark, and Imani Danielle Mosley.

1:30pm: Program Eight - The Islands and the Continent - Olin Hall

Program Eight brings the World War II years into focus. 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.

1 pm Preconcert Talk: Christina Bashford
Performance: Martin Luther Clark, tenor; Brandon Patrick George, flute; Andrey Gugnin, piano; Piers Lane, piano; Lun Li, violin; Alec Manasse, clarinet; Parker Quartet

Gordon Jacob (1895–1984)

Sonatina (1949)

Robert Müller-Hartmann (1884–1950)

Selections from Sieben Skizzen, Op. 6 (1914)

J.S. Bach (1685-1750), arr. for piano by Harriet Cohen (1895–1967)

Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier, BWV 731

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

Hymn Tune Prelude on “Song 13” by Orlando Gibbons for piano (1928)

Egon Wellesz (1885–1974)

Suite for flute solo, Op. 57 (1937)

Arnold Bax (1883–1953)

Sonata, for clarinet and piano (1934)

Howard Ferguson (1908–99)

Four Short Pieces, for clarinet and piano, Op. 6 (1936)

Béla Bartók (1881–1945)

Second Rhapsody, S. 89 (1928, rev. 1935)

Edmund Rubbra (1901–84)

Ave Maria Gratia Plena for tenor and string quartet (1953)

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

String Quartet No. 2 (1944)

8:00pm: Program Nine - A New Elizabethan Age? - Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater

Program Nine Marks the American Symphony Orchestra’s first concert of the festival, presenting 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.

7 pm Preconcert Talk: Michael Beckerman
Orchestral Performance: Brandie Sutton, soprano; members of the Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director; American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director

Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–94)

Proud Thames, coronation overture (1953)

William Walton (1902–83)

Partita for Orchestra (1957–58)

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

Symphony No. 8 in D Minor (1955)

Jean Sibelius (1865–1957)

Andante Festivo (1922/1938)

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

Sinfonia Antartica (Symphony No. 7) (1952)

August 13, 2023

11:00am: Program Ten - Vaughan Williams’s Legacy -  Olin Hall

Program Ten, the festival’s final chamber concert, 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.

10:30am Preconcert Talk: Richard Wilson
Performance: Liam Boisset, oboe; William Hagen, violin; Parker Quartet; Orion Weiss, piano

Ruth Gipps (1921–99)

The Piper of Dreams, Op. 12b (1940)

Michael Tippett (1905–98)

Piano Sonata No. 1 (1938)

Samuel Barber (1910–81)

Serenade, for string quartet (1928)

Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912–90)

Pastorale (1936)

Constant Lambert (1906–51)

Elegiac Blues (1927)

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

Sonata in A Minor (1954)

3:00pm: Program Eleven - Vaughan Williams and Shakespeare: Sir John in Love - Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater

Program Eleven presents Vaughan Williams’ opera, Sir John in Love, 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.

Marking 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:

“The score reveals the composer as a master of comic opera, deftly intercutting Shakespeare’s intricate word-play with the chromatically searching manner of works from the 1920s like the Pastoral Symphony or Flos Campi. Everything is drawn together in scintillating style, and the best moments … are from an exceptional vintage in Vaughan Williams’s creativity.”

2pm preconcert talk: Tiffany Stern
performance: with Craig Colclough, bass-baritone, as Falstaff; Brandie Sutton, soprano, as Anne Page; Ann Toomey, soprano, as Mistress Page; Sarah Saturnino, mezzo-soprano, as Mistress Ford; Lucy Schaufer, mezzo-soprano, as Mistress Quickly; Joshua Blue, tenor, as Fenton; Keith Jameson, baritone, as Dr. Caius; William Socolof, bass-baritone, as Frank Ford; and others

Bard Festival Chorale, James Bagwell, choral director
American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director
Alison Moritz, director

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

Sir John in Love  (1928)

Date: August 4, 2023 - August 13, 2023

Location: Various Venues in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

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