ON AND OFF CAMPUS: FROM MOLIÈRE TO MAMAFUNK

Jordan Bellow and Amelia Workman in Dom Juan, photo by Maria Baranova

In honor of Molière’s 400th anniversary, SummerScape 2022 opened with the world premiere of a new adaptation of his 1665 Dom Juan by director Ashley Tata, with a new translation commissioned from scholar Sylvaine Guyot and Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester. One of the first female directors to take on the French tragicomedy, Tata set the story in a fantasy world where 17thcentury France meets late-1970s America, raising pertinent questions about class, faith, and gender and subverting the play’s traditional patriarchal power structure by casting both the titular libertine and Sganarelle, Dom Juan’s assistant and sidekick, as women. Tata, who is visiting artist in residence in Bard’s Theater and Performance Program, directed the College’s live online production of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest during the 2020 lockdown.

After missing two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Bard’s authentic Belgian Spiegeltent was back, hosting live music, dancing, and dining throughout much of the summer in the tent of mirrors and stained glass set up near the Fisher Center. Highlights included the return of Black Roots Summer, a celebration of Black roots music curated by Michael Mwenso and Jono Gasparro; roots rocker Martha Redbone; and art-rock new-wave goddess Nona Hendryx with her band Mamafunk.

The 32nd Bard Music Festival, “Rachmaninoff and His World,” offered a retrospective of the contradictory life and times of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943), perhaps the last great representative of Russian Romanticism. Born in Imperial Russia, he spent more than half of his life in Western exile; best remembered as a composer, he made his living primarily as a pianist and conductor; and all too often dismissed by critics as a middle-brow reactionary, he remains adored by audiences for his soaring “big tunes.” The first weekend of the festival traced the complex course the composer navigated between Russia and modernity, and was followed the next weekend by an investigation of his relationship with the new worlds he went on to conquer. The 12 concert programs and panel discussions explored such themes as composition during the Cold War, virtuoso pianists and their public, and America’s ongoing love affair with Rachmaninoff’s music. Performers included The Orchestra Now and the American Symphony Orchestra under Leon Botstein’s baton and the Bard Festival Chorale led by James Bagwell.

This year’s opera was The Silent Woman (Die schweigsame Frau), by Richard Strauss, in a rare new production from Christian Räth, the German director responsible for SummerScape 2019’s Das Wunder der Heliane. The New York Times selected The Silent Woman as a Critic’s Pick, with reviewer Oussama Zahr writing, “The witty staging, engaging cast, and efficiently evocative designs made a good opera feel like a great one.” Based on a piece by Renaissance playwright Ben Jonson and set to a scintillating libretto by Stefan Zweig, The Silent Woman is the story of a retired British admiral who craves the quiet life, and of his nephew, his nephew’s wife, and the barber who come between him and his modest aspirations.