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

The Fisher Center, Bard College, Summer, 2009. Photo © 2009 Michael Miller.


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 of Richard Strauss’s Opera Die Liebe der Danae

Scandinavia’s rich cultural heritage, and the question of artistic conservatism in the modernist age, will be explored at the eighth annual Bard SummerScape festival, which once again features a sumptuous tapestry of musicoperatheaterdancefilm, and cabaret, keyed to the theme of the 22nd annual Bard Music Festival.  Presented in the striking Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on Bard College’s bucolic Hudson River campus, the seven-week festival opens on July 7 with the first of four performances by Finland’sTero Saarinen Company, and closes on August 21 with a party in Bard’s beloved Spiegeltent, which returns for the full seven weeks. This year’s Bard Music Festival explores Sibelius and His World, and some of the great Finnish symphonist’s most fascinating contemporaries provide other SummerScape highlights, including New York’s first fully-staged production ofRichard Strauss’s 1940 opera Die Liebe der DanaeNoël Coward’s chamber opera, Bitter Sweet (1929); Henrik Ibsen’s classic drama The Wild Duck (1884); and a film festival, “Before and After Bergman: The Best of Nordic Film.”

Read the full preview on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller