Concert of the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra at the Great Hall

The Great Hall of Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory

Shostakovich and His World

Orchestra of the Bard College Conservatory
Leon Botstein, conductor (USA)
Dawn Upshaw, soprano (USA)

Gioacchino Rossini. Overture to Guillaume Tell
Richard Wagner. Siegfried’s Funeral March from Götterdämmerung
Witold Lutosławski. Chantefleurs et chantefables for soprano and orchestra (1990)
Dmitry Shostakovich. Symphony No. 15 in A Major (1975)

The Orchestra of the Bard College Conservatory is to be visiting Moscow for the first time. The Orchestra, founded in 2005, has asserted itself performing at some leading concert venues around the globe: twice at the Lincoln Center in New York City and at the Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre, as well as in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing.

On June 11, the Orchestra will take the stage under the baton of the Bard College President, Leon Botstein, who recently celebrated his twentieth anniversary as the music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Botstein is also a conductor of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra and the artistic co-director of the Bard SummerScape Music Festival, which takes place at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Leon Botstein is also highly regarded as a music historian, being an author of numerous articles and books.

The soloist, Dawn Upshaw (soprano), is a four-time Grammy Awardee who has achieved worldwide celebrity as a singer of opera and concert repertoire ranging from sacred works of J.S. Bach to the freshest sounds of today.

The concert program appears as a thrilling combination of popular classic and pieces by twentieth-century composers, which are Rossini’s reassuring Overture and Wagner’s existential Funeral March, as well as Lutosławski’s expressive songs and Shostakovish’s confessional last symphony.

Following one of the Bard Conservatory Orchestra’s performances of Russian music, David Griesinger, a famous critic, wrote: “From the first notes it was obvious that these young players understood what was to come… This was easily the most moving performance of this amazing piece [Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5] that I have heard. Special credit goes, of course, to Botstein, but he had the help of some magnificent playing…” The upcoming Moscow concert will be a part of the Bard Conservatory Orchestra’s big European tour. The concerts are also scheduled in Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Budapest, Bratislava, Vienna, Berlin and Prague.

The press release is prepared by the Moscow Conservatory’s PR Department.
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