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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 which Antonín Dvořák set his 1882 opera Dimitrij. A stellar cast along with the Bard Festival Chorale animate this powerful production by Anne Bogart for…

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 today. Conducted by Leon Botstein and directed by the renowned American director Thaddeus Strassberge. Based on the renowned fantasy poem by Mikhail Lermontov, Demon boasts…

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 of Himself, he succeeded in creating a sophisticated and forward-looking piece. This stylish and elegant production from the 2012 Bard SummerScape festival as directed by…

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 of Russia’s most influential music theorists, teaching for nearly three decades at the Moscow Conservatory where his students included Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, and Glière; Stravinsky later…

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 in 1909. This powerful three-act opera about piracy, love, and betrayal in a community of religious fanatics was staged for the first time in the…

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 program—which includes the operatic rarity Die Liebe der Danae (The Love of Danae) from the 2011 Bard SummerScape along with various symphonic and choral works—explores the composer’s…

“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 String Quartet No. 1, Calvary, which was performed by a string quartet of ASO musicians in September of 2020 at the Washington Lake Park Amphitheater in…

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 old and was quite prolific in his lifetime; his works have been performed by almost every major orchestra in the U.S, and he achieved quite…

The latest ASO Online release was performed live this past September during a socially-distanced chamber music performance at the Washington Lake Park Amphitheater in Sewell, NJ. A string quartet of ASO members performed Trevor Weston‘s Juba as part of a program of works by Black composers, curated by ASO violinist Philip Payton. The term “Juba”…

The middle movement of Samuel Barber’s String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11 (1935), later arranged by the composer for orchestra as Adagio for Strings, is “one of the most recognizable pieces of classical music in the world” (NPR). In a live socially-distanced chamber music performance, members of the ASO performed all three movements of…