From the Fisher Center to Lincoln Center:
The Bard Conservatory Orchestra and its well-rounded education.
by Philip Ehrensaft
Of all the Bard College success stories, the rapid rise of
the Bard Conservatory to national and international prominence is likely the
college's biggest bang in the shortest time. In 2003, the Bard Conservatory was
a promising idea for a new approach to professional music education proposed by
Robert Martin, who was simultaneously an eminent cellist, a philosophy
professor with a PhD from Yale, a vice-president of Bard College, and the
president of Chamber Music America. Martin was inspired by the newly opened
Fisher Center for the Performing Arts—providing the class act venue that is a
necessary component of a class act conservatory.
Martin advanced two core ideas for creating a new Bard Music
Conservatory: first, breaking with standard conservatory education, where
accomplished young musicians are chosen directly from high school on the basis
of highly competitive auditions, as well as the usual grades and recommendations.
Conservatories then give them rigorous musical training, but little else.
That's viewed as optimal for upping performance levels by youngsters who have
already demonstrated their exceptional talents and willingness to work very,
very hard. Stick close to your knitting.
On the basis of his own trajectory, Martin respectfully
disagrees. He passed the admission gauntlet for an elite conservatory, the
Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, but also wanted to do a liberal arts
degree at an equally elite liberal arts college, Haverford. Curtis discouraged
the young Martin from such a perceived distraction, but he persisted and
emerged five years later with two sheepskins in hand. Martin continued the same
dual path, simultaneously doing things like playing cello in the highly reputed
Sequoia String Quartet and earning tenure as philosophy professor.
Above all, Martin sees this dual path as the opposite of
distraction for development as a musician. His liberal arts and then doctoral
philosophy training upped his curiosity, reasoning capacity, and ability to see
connections between things. That, in turn, advanced his understanding of the
structure and meaning of the scores on his music stand, and how to communicate
that understanding to audiences. He wanted to create a conservatory where every
student would reap the fruits of multidisciplinary synergy.
That idea got a ready green light from Bard College's
president and fellow polymath, Leon Botstein. After dual training as an
historian and conductor, Botstein became the president of Bard College in 1975,
at the ripe old age of 29. Botstein and Martin co-directed the rise of the Bard
Music Festival, from a promising event at an exurban college into a major event
in Greater New York's crowded, competitive music season. A working partnership
was ready to go. Martin recruited yet another Bard polymath as the
vice-director of the proposed conservatory, Melvin Chen—a classical pianist who
also earned a Harvard PhD in chemistry.
The second pillar of the proposed new conservatory was
pragmatic: it would be very expensive to hire high-level musicians as full-time
faculty. Being located in the exurban fringe of the country's principal music
market, New York City, presented an evident alternative: dip into NYC's deep
pool of elite musicians, who would commute to Bard to give lessons. The Bard
Conservatory's faculty is a who's who sampling of top Big Apple talent. To name
but a few: Dawn Upshaw in vocal music; Shmuel Ashkenasi, Eugene Drucker and
Arnold Steinhardt for violin; and Jeremy Denk, Richard Goode, and Peter Serkin
for piano.
In the fall of 2004, the Bard Conservatory was still an
embryonic proposal. Within just one year, the Conservatory opened the doors for
its first cohort of 20 students in September 2005. In contrast to my alma
mater, Oberlin, Bard Conservatory students are required to do a second,
non-music degree. Martin learned that, while a majority of students admitted to
Oberlin's conservatory expressed an interest in doing dual degrees, only 15 percent
actually did so. The goal was to recruit students willing to take on the
substantially extra time and work that had enriched Martin, Botstein and Chen,
both as musicians and as informed citizens.
Now there are 90 carefully selected students, half from
across the US and half from abroad. That's enough musicians to form the Bard
Conservatory's full symphony orchestra, a young ensemble that quickly became
good enough, guided by Botstein's baton, to dare a Lincoln Center debut in
2010. This May 22, the BCO returns to Lincoln Center for a concert presaging
August's 24th edition of the Bard Music Festival, Stravinsky and His World.
Hudson Valley residents don't have to trek to Manhattan to
hear what the BCO will perform at Lincoln Center. On May 11, they'll perform
the same repertoire in the Fisher Center's acoustical gem, the Sosnoff Theater,
starting with Stravinsky's
seminal early piece, Feu d'Artifice (Fireworks), Op. 4. Fireworks showed such promise that the
ballet impressario Sergei Diaghalev hired the young Stravinsky, still a
student, to compose The Firebird. Then there's Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1 in D, featuring one of
Bard's prize faculty catches, Shmuel
Ashkenasi, as the soloist. The concert wraps up with Shostakovich's bold Symphony No.
10.
May also brings 11 recitals by graduating Bard Conservatory
students, and an opportunity to hear why they are getting admitted to graduate
programs in America's big name conservatories. There will also be a four-part
Chamber Music Marathon running on the weekend of May 3-5. The details can be
found at the Conservatory's website, bard.edu/conservatory/events. You can also
take the opportunity to see the brand new Bard Conservatory Building, made
possible by a beyond-generous $9.2 million gift from Bard alumnus Lazlo Z.
Bito.
Posted by Chris Hewitt
on 11:05 AM.
Filed under
.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0
