MoreConcerts

The 22nd Bard Music Festival will focus on the life and times of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, whose startling, intense compositions evoke a range of powerful and unique associations—an imaginary sonic vision of mythic tales, Nordic landscape, and the haunting sounds of a midsummer night.

The Bard Music Festival was founded in 1990 to promote new ways of understanding and presenting the history of music to a contemporary audience. Each year, a single composer is chosen as the main subject. The festival explores his biography, considers his influences and the consequences of his achievement, and examines all aspects of the musical culture surrounding the time and place of his life.

The Daedalus Quartet, Pianist Anna Polonsky, & Soprano Lucy Dhegrae

The Daedalus Quartet (violinists Min-Young Kim and Ara Gregorian; violist Jessica Thompson; and cellist Raman Ramakrishnan) has established itself as a leader among the new generation of string ensembles. The ensemble has performed in many leading venues, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Library of Congress, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and Boston’s Gardner Museum. Abroad the ensemble has been heard at the Musikverein in Vienna, the Mozarteum in Salzburg, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and the Cité de la Musique in Paris, among others. The Quartet has won plaudits for its adventurous exploration of contemporary music, most notably the compositions of Elliott Carter, George Perle, György Kurtág, György Ligeti, and David Horne. The group has collaborated with some of the world’s finest instrumentalists, including Marc-André Hamelin, Simone Dinnerstein, Awadagin Pratt, Joyce Yang, Benjamin Hochman, Paquito D’Rivera, Alexander Fiterstein, Roger Tapping, and Donald Weilerstein. Honors include Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award and Chamber Music America’s Guarneri String Quartet Award.

Anna Polonsky made her solo piano debut at the age of seven at the Special Central Music School in Moscow, Russia. She emigrated to the United States in 1990, and attended high school at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. She received her Bachelor of Music diploma from The Curtis Institute of Music, where she worked with the renowned pianist Peter Serkin, and continued her studies with Jerome Lowenthal, earning her Master’s Degree from the Juilliard School. Polonsky was a recipient of a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship in 2003. With the violist Michael Tree and clarinetist Anthony McGill, she is a member of the newly formed Schumann Trio. In addition to performing, she serves on the piano faculty of Vassar College. She is a Steinway Artist.

Ms. Polonsky has appeared with the Moscow Virtuosi, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, the Memphis Symphony, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, and many others. Ms. Polonsky has collaborated with the Guarneri, Orion, and Shanghai Quartets, and with such musicians as Mitsuko Uchida, David Shifrin, Richard Goode, Ida and Ani Kavafian, Cho-Liang Lin, Arnold Steinhardt, Anton Kuerti, Gary Hoffman, and Fred Sherry. She has given concerts in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Vienna Konzerthaus, Alice Tully Hall, and Carnegie Hall’s Stern, Weill, and Zankel Halls, and has toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. A frequent guest at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, she was a member of the Chamber Music Society Two during 2002-2004. In 2006 she took a part in the European Broadcasting Union’s project to record and broadcast all of Mozart’s keyboard sonatas, and in the spring of 2007 she performed a solo recital at Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium to inaugurate the Emerson Quartet’s Perspectives Series.

Soprano Lucy Dhegrae is a graduate student in the Bard College Conservatory Vocal Arts Program where she works with Edith Bers, Kayo Iwama, and Dawn Upshaw. She is a lover of new music and has premiered new works at the Morgan Library in New York City as has worked with new music ensembles Contemporaneous and Da Capo Chamber Players. She is the founder of the Prism Project, a collective of artists from all different media who collaborate to create installations mixing poetry, music, dance, photography, theater, visual art, and film. A graduate of the University of Michigan, she also studied with soprano Sylvia Greenberg in Vienna, Austria. She is married to composer Shawn Jaeger.

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Photo Courtesy of ensemble mise-en

THU – 6-16-2011 – 8:00 PM
Pre-concert talk @ 8 pm by Robert Martin, co-artistic director of the Bard Music Festival & director of the Bard College Conservatory of Music
$15 ($10 ASF Members)