Prokofiev sneak peek

The music from Peter & the Wolf is running through my head as I type this ...

We spotlight a dozen exceptional summer festivals in the June issue of Hudson Valley Connoisseur magazine (available now at regional Barnes & Noble stores and other local places listed here.) One of the exciting events is the Bard Music Festival and Summerscape, taking place between July 4 and August 17 at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on the Bard College campus off Route 9G in Annandale-on-Hudson (town of Red Hook.)

And -- if you are in Manhattan Thursday evening -- you can get a sneak peak at the Bard Music Festival, which this year has the theme Sergey Prokofiev and His World. Here are the details:

BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL PREVIEW 2008: Prokofiev and His World
Presented by The Morgan Library & Museum

In a lecture with musical illustrations, Leon Botstein (President, Bard College; artistic codirector, Bard Music Festival; and music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra) discusses the upcoming summer music festival at Bard that highlights the music and life of Prokofiev and his contemporaries. The Bard Festival String Quartet will perform musical excerpts.
Thursday, June 5, 6:30 PM

Tickets: $20 for Non-Members; $15 for Morgan Members
Call 212-685-0008, ext 560 or visit www.themorgan.org
The Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York City

Best remembered for a few popular scores, including Peter and the Wolf and Romeo & Juliet, Prokofiev's various works for the violin, piano, flute, and cello became standard in the repertoire of the 20th century. But much of his music is not well known, and the twists and turns in his career and style demand close inspection and reconsideration. Likewise, his views on art, politics, and the spiritual challenges of modern life require an understanding of the several worlds in which he worked: the St. Petersburg of his youth, Paris in the interwar period, and the United States, where he lived for two years and where he composed his first great operatic success, The Love for Three Oranges. His career taken as a whole allows us to rethink the nature of modernism and the connection of music to 20th-century politics and culture in Russia, Europe, and America.

Tickets and a schedule for events on the Bard campus this summer can be obtained at the Fisher Center Web site or by calling 845-758-7900