It is the most elegant, scholarly, and fun arts festival in America, organized under the big umbrella of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College.

SummerScape 2012 will run for seven glorious weeks from July 6 to August 19. And if there’s not enough opera, music, theater, dance, film or cabaret for the visitor, it’s only a short drive over to the Berkshires and Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow and four world class theatre companies. And there is experimental theatre, music and dance there, too, with the Berkshire Fringe Festival, at the Daniels Arts Center in Great Barrington. Their schedule which kicks off July 23, 2012 will be announced in June. We will post it as soon as details are announced. Maybe even before. Stay tuned.

The 2012 Music Festival celebrates French composer Camille Saint-Saëns, whose remarkable career shaped not only the history of music, but also the ways in which that history was transmitted and communicated to the public. The two weeks of concerts and surrounding events are many and of such depth we have devoted a separate preview and schedule of concerts here.

To our way of thinking, the top event of 2012 is The King in Spite of Himself, an opéra-comique about a reluctant ruler by Saint-Saëns’s contemporary Emmanuel Chabrier.

Or maybe it is this really unusual French dance company that seamlessly blends the baroque and the contemporary. No, wait, it is a production of Molière’s hilarious comedy The Imaginary Invalid. Which to choose. Oh, and don’t forget the unusual and provocative film festival, and the lively cabaret and eclectic musical acts of the Spiegeltent. Ultimately, Bard SummerScape is a festival like no other and deserves your consideration as you plan your summer cultural itinerary.

Our more detailed rundown follows.

THE KING IN SPITE OF HIMSELF

(LE ROI MALGRÉ LUI)

Friday, July 27, 7 pm
Sunday, July 29, 3 pm
Wednesday, August 1, 3 pm
Friday, August 3, 7 pm
Sunday, August 5, 3 pm

Tickets: $30, 60, 70, 90

Call 845-758-7948 for information about premium seating with special benefits, including reserved parking.

The Opera Talk for The King in Spite of Himself will take place at 1 pm on Sunday, July 29 in Sosnoff Theater. Free and open to the public.
Music by Emmanuel Chabrier
Sung in French, with English supertitles
American Symphony Orchestra
Conducted by Leon Botstein, music director
Directed by Thaddeus Strassberger
Set Design by Kevin Knight
Costumes by Mattie Ullrich
Lighting by Simon Corder

A coproduction with the Wexford Festival Opera.

“From the wondrous opening fanfare for brass and winds, with its wayward phrase structure and playful hints of medieval harmony, the score is glorious.”—Anthony Tommasini, New York Times

It’s always been lonely at the top, but has any monarch been lonelier than Henri de Valois? In Emmanuel Chabrier’s witty comic opera, this hapless 16th-century French noble has been chosen by the Poles to be their king, although various factions are already plotting against him. Moreover, poor Henri is repelled by the weather, the food, and the fashion, and pines for his milieu in Anjou. Farce ensues when he tries to eschew the crown, but fate is sometimes easier to reluctantly accept than to escape.

A contemporary of Camille Saint-Saëns, the subject of this year’s Bard Music Festival, Chabrier composed two highly regarded orchestral works, España and Joyeuse marche, as well as operas, songs, and piano music. Of The King in Spite of Himself, Maurice Ravel declared that its opening bars forever changed the course of French harmony; indeed, Ravel confessed to having been influenced more by Chabrier than any other composer. This production of The King in Spite of Himself, the first staged revival of Chabrier’s 1887 version, is directed by Thaddeus Strassberger, who also directed Bard SummerScape’s acclaimed productions of Les Huguenots (2009) and The Distant Sound (2010).

Special support for this program is provided by Emily H. Fisher and John Alexander. Opera Talks are presented in memory of Sylvia Redlick Green.

COMPAGNIE FÊTES GALANTES

LET MY JOY REMAIN (QUE MA JOIE DEMEURE)

Friday, July 6, 8 pm
Saturday, July 7, 8 pm
Sunday, July 8, 3 pm
Tickets: $25, 40, 45, 55

Choreography by Béatrice Massin

Light, sparkling, full of soft bubbles that are about to burst at any time. The end of the show has to be read as a breath of pleasure in the right respect of Bach’s spirit and musicality.—Le Monde

Founded in 1993 by Béatrice Massin, Compagnie fêtes galantes elaborates on the many aspects of baroque dance, wedding them to contemporary choreography. By avoiding any attempt at reconstitution, fêtes galantes brings forward, in our time, a kind of baroque dancing that engages and appeals to a contemporary sensibility.

Massin was drawn to baroque dance by the music of the period, which she describes as being full of “movement, energy, and vitality.” Accordingly, Let My Joy Remain, the work that she and her dancers are presenting on this program, is built from phrases that come together in canons and fugues, subjects and counter-subjects, and danced to the music of J. S. Bach.

Running time for the program is approximately 60 minutes.

THE IMAGINARY INVALID BY MOLIÈRE

LE MALADE IMAGINAIRE

Friday, July 13, 8 pm
Saturday, July 14, 3 and 8 pm
Sunday, July 15, 3 pm
Wednesday, July 18, 3 pm
Thursday, July 19, 8 pm
Friday, July 20, 8 pm
Saturday, July 21, 3 and 8 pm
Sunday, July 22, 3 pm
Tickets: $45

Directed by Erica Schmidt
Costumes by Andrea Lauer
Set Design by Laura Jellinek
Lighting by David Weiner

“Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.”— Molière

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, who wrote and achieved immortality as Molière, made his dramatic debut in a converted tennis court and went on to direct and perform in his own comedies under the patronage of King Louis XIV. In such satirical romps as The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and The Miser, his nimble way of skewering the rich, powerful, and pretentious, as well as hypocrites of every stripe and persuasion, both delighted and outraged the audiences of his day, and the plays have lost none of their freshness and bite more than three centuries later.

The Imaginary Invalid—Molière’s final play—elicits comedy from the phantom agonies of Argan, a housebound hypochondriac who schemes to marry his daughter to a doctor. (In more than a touch of irony, the playwright, while acting in the title role, suffered a hemorrhage and died a few hours later.) Erica Schmidt, who directed three previous SummerScape offerings—The Tender Land, The Sorcerer, and Uncle Vanya—leads a spirited cast in this production.

This performance has been underwritten by the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation.

BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL

SAINT-SAËNS AND HIS WORLD

The career of Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) spanned the course of French music from Gounod to Ravel, and his prodigious and stylistically varied output helps to define our understanding of the classical, the romantic, and the modern in music. Over the course of two weekends, the 23rd Bard Music Festival will explore the life and times of the French composer, with performances of many of his masterworks—including his Third Symphony—and works by his contemporaries.

August 10–12 and August 17–19

A separate story and complete calendar of events for this extensive music festival can be found here.

FILM FESTIVAL: FRANCE AND THE COLONIAL IMAGINATION

All films are screened at the Ottaway Film Center
Thursdays and Sundays, July 12–August 12, 7 pm

Tickets: $8

The SummerScape 2012 film festival offers 10 highly celebrated films, made on an international scale across several decades, which offer marvelously diverse perspectives on how French colonialism and its aftermath have been cinematically depicted by major artists. The three films from the classic sound era of the 1930s and ’40s—Morocco, Pépé le Moko, and Casablanca—present unabashedly romantic visions of North Africa under the height of French domination, when Europeans (especially males) thought of the region as an exotic place to go into hiding. All three works have indelibly stamped themselves into the popular imagination, perhaps most memorably by way of their charismatic stars. In stark contrast, the works of Resnais and Pontecorvo—Muriel and The Battle of Algiers, respectively—represent the politically charged and aesthetically innovative period of the 1960s that was much troubled by the violent means of holding on to empire. In the same decade, the Senegalese novelist Ousmane Sembane returned to his native country and realized that his French-language stories could only be read by the elite. Turning to filmmaking to reach a wider audience, he became arguably the most important figure in the founding of an African cinema. His films Xala and Camp de Thiaroye portray both colonial and postcolonial West Africa from an indigenous point of view.

The series also contains three films by distinguished directors who are very much still active on the contemporary scene. Michael Haneke, of Austria, has made a number of films designed to get under the skin of the audience in a rather infamously irritating manner and to leave it with no easy answers to complex sociopolitical issues. Among other possible readings, Caché can be interpreted as a kind of allegorical study of a contemporary society repressing the memory of its imperialist past. Claire Denis, who was raised in colonial Africa because of a father who was a civil servant, takes a similarly probing approach to social issues in a way that often rethinks the borderlines between European and non-European identity. Though the films that she has set in Africa derive from the actual landscape and a lived experience, the radical aestheticism of a work like Beau Travail gives it a dreamlike, erotic power to the extent that a kind of neoromanticism is evoked.

Finally, when it comes to the French empire, it would have been a mistake to leave out Indochina. Rithy Panh is a native Cambodian whose family suffered horribly under the Khmer Rouge. He escaped to Thailand and then made his way to Paris, where he eventually studied filmmaking. He returned to Cambodia in the 1990s to make a series of acclaimed films. Though highly regarded, The Sea Wall was unfortunately never distributed in the United States. Significantly enough, as if to underscore the complexity of perspectives in this film series, it is based on a novel by Marguerite Duras, the widely read French author, who herself had been born and raised in Indochina until the age of 17.

Bard SummerScape is pleased to present all titles on 35mm film (whenever possible).

July 12 Morocco
July 15 Muriel
July 19 The Battle of Algiers
July 22 Xala
July 26 Pépé le Moko
July 29 The Sea Wall
August 2 Camp de Thiaroye
August 5 Beau travail
August 9 Casablanca
August 12 Caché

Ticket and Subscription Information, Discounts, Policies and Ordering is available now on the Bard Website (fishercenter.bard.edu/tickets).