The Fisher Center at Bard College. Photo by Peter Aaron.
In Tuesday’s (2/3) Playbill.com (NYC), Natan Zamansky writes, “The Fisher Center at Bard [College] has announced the SummerScape 2026 lineup, featuring dance, music, opera, and more over the course of the eight-week festival in the Hudson Valley. The festival kicks off with the world premiere of Suddenly Last Summer, a new opera by Courtney Bryan based on the Tennessee Williams play … Running June 25-July 19 … the opera features a libretto by Gideon Lester and Daniel Fish, with Fish also serving as director. SummerScape Opera will present Die ägyptische Helena, running July 24-August 2 … The rarely performed opera by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal imagines life for Helen and Menelaus, King and Queen of Sparta, immediately following the Trojan war…. The Bard Music Festival, now in its 36th season, will celebrate Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 11 concerts featuring the American Symphony Orchestra and The Orchestra Now, both led by Botstein. The programs will include some of Mozart’s best-loved symphonies and concertos, as well as rarely performed works such as the Masonic Cantata and Davide Penitente, and works by Mozart’s contemporaries including Joseph and Michael Haydn, Antonio Salieri, Johann Christian Bach, and Franz Süssmayr. The festival will culminate in a semi-staged performance of Die Entführung aus dem Serail.”
