Russia’s profound and far-reaching impact on 20th-century culture will be explored at the 2013 annual Bard SummerScape festival, which once again offers an extraordinary summer of music, opera, theater, dance, film, and cabaret, keyed to the theme of the 24th annual Bard Music Festival, Stravinsky and His World. 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 6 with the first of two performances of A Rite (2013) by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and SITI Company, and closes on August 18 with a party in Bard’s beloved Spiegeltent, which returns for the full seven weeks. Complementing the Bard Music Festival’s exploration of “Stravinsky and His World,” some of the great Russian-born composer’s most captivating compatriots provide key SummerScape highlights. These include the U.S. stage premiere of Sergey Taneyev’s opera Oresteia; the world premiere of an original stage adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s seminal novel The Master and Margarita; and a film festival titled “Stravinsky’s Legacy and Russian Émigré Cinema.” Together, SummerScape’s offerings will continue Bard’s yearlong tenth-anniversary celebrations for the Frank Gehry–designed Fisher Center.

Dubbed “part boot camp for the brain, part spa for the spirit” by the New York Times, the Bard Music Festival provides the creative inspiration for SummerScape, presenting “Stravinsky and His World”: an illuminating and extensive program of orchestral, choral, and chamber concerts, as well as preconcert talks and panel discussions, all devoted to examining the life and times of Igor Stravinsky, arguably the most important composer of the 20th century. The groundbreaking nature of his music is in part due to the broad and eclectic range of influences on which he drew. Over the course of his long career, these included such unlikely bedfellows as Russia’s folk and classical traditions, African-American ragtime, the Baroque concerto grosso, and Second Viennese School 12-tone technique. The Bard Music Festival offers an immersion in the worlds Stravinsky straddled, from their luminaries to their lesser-known figures, contextualizing him within the musically distinct milieus—all of them cultural melting pots—that he inhabited: pre-revolutionary Russia, 1920s Paris, and postwar Hollywood. A wide range of Stravinsky’s music will be performed, from canonical masterworks like The Rite of Spring and Symphony of Psalms to such comparative rarities as Mavra and his melodrama Perséphone. With its recognized gift for thematic programming, Bard achieves a depth and breadth of musical and cultural discovery that is truly unique. The two weekends of the Bard Music Festival will take place on August 9–11 and August 16–18.

For more information visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call 845-758-7900.