Posts Tagged ‘Finland’
Sibelius III: Reflections on the 2011 Bard Music Festival
“I’d go anywhere to hear a Sibelius-palooza like this,” exclaimed Beth, a New York television producer and first-time Bard Festival visitor. Ernest, a veteran of many festivals and a geneticist in his 70s, credited Bard with inspiring him to revisit a childhood dream and take courses at Bard’s Conductor’s Institute. Lisa from Woodstock usually opts [...]
Sibelius II: Larry Wallach on the Bard Music Festival 2011 – Jean Sibelius and his World
Originality is a hard concept to get a hold of — there is no yardstick for measuring it, by its very nature. This makes the evaluation of composers, the assessment of their influence and historical position, one of the most subjective areas of music history and criticism. Contemporary writers have become impatient with their predecessors’ habit of rating composers in terms of “importance” or “greatness” based, at least in part, on their originality. And then there is the issue of “unique voice” — is that the same as originality? Is their any good composer who lacks either one? Can “uniqueness” be evaluated?
Sibelius I: Bard Music Festival 2011 – Jean Sibelius and his World
One shouldn’t let anything get in the way of a Bard Music Festival—and the surrounding Summerscape opera, play, and dance performances, etc., least of all one’s preconceptions about composers. In one case only, Prokofiev (Bard Festival 2008), I approached the Festival with thoughts of taking a mildly rebarbative medicine, but I soon learned how wrong I was, thanks to the Russophile enthusiasm of my friend, Robert Kurilla, who has written about Prokofiev in the Review, and, of course, the lectures and programs of the Festival itself. In Prokofiev’s case the problem was that his best known works give an extremely limited, really inaccurate, idea of him and that his best work is little-known and rather challenging.
Bard SummerScape 2011 Explores the Life and Times of Jean Sibelius with a Seven-Week Arts Festival in New York’s Hudson Valley, July 7 – August 21, 2011
[UPDATE: read our review of the festival here.] Bard SummerScape 2011 Explores the Life and Times of Jean Sibelius with a Seven-Week Arts Festival in New York’s Hudson Valley, July 7 – August 21, 2011 Includes 22nd Bard Music Festival, “Sibelius and His World” and New York’s First Staged Production [...]
