“Richly costumed and dramatically effective…Botstein, leading the American Symphony Orchestra, an impressive cast and the excellent Bard Festival Chorale, made a compelling case for the piece.”—New York Times, August 2021…

At once opulent and eerie, Pietro Mascagni’s Iris, composed in 1898 with libretto by Luigi Illica, received its North American premiere at Bard SummerScape in 2016. The American Symphony Orchestra performs…

Henri VIII is French grand opera at its most magnificent. In this love triangle for the ages, an infamous Tudor king is determined to divorce Catherine of Aragon in favor of…

Considered Strauss’s only true comic opera, this rarely performed work is by turns elegiac and incisively witty. The brilliantly written libretto by Stefan Zweig (loosely based on the Renaissance play…

“A riveting and rousing piece. [Director] Christian Räth’s astute production…[makes] a case for 19th-century French grand opera.” —Wall Street Journal “Leon Botstein has a penchant for reappraisal. He mounted a…

A short film about the American Symphony Orchestra’s massive undertaking of Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder. The film takes a behind-the-scenes look at the rehearsal process leading up to the highly anticipated…

The ASO presents Sergei Taneyev’s final work, At the Reading of a Psalm in a live concert film experience. Conceived as a massive statement of Russian Orthodox faith at the…

Ficciones is an immersive concert film experience featuring Roberto Sierra’s newly commissioned Concerto for Electric Violin, which presents a mixture of Sierra’s Latin-influenced ideas and modern compositional techniques through the…

A truly American genre, the ASO presented this jazz ensemble as a salute to America’s jazz royalty: New Jersey-native jazz pianist, organist, and composer Count Basie, considered one of the…

United We Play is a short film inspired by the current turbulent times, and the belief that strength comes through adversity—where there is divide, there is also community. The project…

Set in an unnamed totalitarian state, The Miracle of Heliane (Das Wunder der Heliane) features an intricate, erotic triangle between a ruthless despot, The Ruler; his beautiful and neglected wife, Heliane; and…

In collaboration with Bard’s Fisher Center, ASO Online illuminates the work of German Romantic composer Carl Maria von Weber, featuring his Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 1 and…

A great nation in turmoil after the abrupt end to a ruling dynasty leaving no clear path forward. This was Russia in the Time of Troubles, the seventeenth-century period in…

SummerScape’s production of Anton Rubinstein’s operatic masterpiece Demon first premiered to great acclaim in 1871. Although performed frequently in Russia, the work remains something of a rarity in the West…

A contemporary of Saint-Saëns, Emmanuel Chabrier was an independent-minded and important innovator—many saw him as having paved the way for French modernism. With his comic opera The King in Spite…

A highly gifted pianist and composer, Taneyev was a protégé and champion of Tchaikovsky’s, serving as a soloist in early performances of the older composer’s piano concertos. Taneyev was one…

Written by Dame Ethel Smyth, English composer and leader in the women’s suffrage movement, The Wreckers was first performed in Germany in 1906 and was mounted in the composer’s homeland…

One of the most revered Romantic composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Richard Strauss’s symphonic poems and operas remain an indispensable feature of the standard repertoire. This…

“When I sat down to write this string quartet, I was not trying to write something Black, I was just writing out of my experience,” said Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932-2004) about his…

In 1946, American composer George Walker (1922-2018) wrote what would become one of his most notable works at the young age of 24: String Quartet no. 1. Walker was introduced to music at 5 years…