'BARD SUMMERSCAPE 2004'
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Bard College, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 845.758.7900, bard.edu/fishercenter
JULY 8-AUGUST 22:This summer's performing arts festival in and around Frank Gehry's delicious new theater building concentrates on Russia, specifically emphasizing Shostakovich and Gogol. There will be concerts, plays, operas, films, late-night cabaret, and early-morning panels. The music starts July 22 with Mel Marvin's new chamber opera about the Isaiah Berlin-Anna Akhmatova love affair. Then Shostakovich's comic Gogol opera, The Nose, begins a run July 28 as staged by Francesca Zambello, who also directs a cabaret version of Shostakovich's musical comedy about housing corruption, Moscow: Cherry Tree Towers, August 11 through 15. The final two weekends of SummerScape bring the 15th annual exploration by Bard and its president, Leon Botstein, into the work and influences of a single composer. This year, surprise, it's Shostakovich, and concerts, panels, and arguments concerning his and compatriots' music will abound.
'CARAMOOR INTERNATIONAL MUSIC FESTIVAL'
149 Girdle Ridge Road, Katonah, New York, 914.232.1252, caramoor.org
JUNE 26-AUGUST 14:It's a mix of symphonic and chamber music, opera, song recitals, pop, and jazz, mostly on weekends and outdoors under tents. Pay particular attention to:
JULY 8:Several fine musicians play or sing Barber, Gershwin, Joan Tower, Griffes, Derek Bermel, Copland, and Menotti.
JULY 9:Today's most riveting mezzo, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and others do songs by several Spanish composers and Spain-inspired numbers by Schumann and Wolf.
JULY 10:Will Crutchfield conducts a semi-staging of Gluck's exquisite opera Paride ed Elena.
JULY 18: The opera Cendrillon, by the legendary singer Pauline Viardot, gets a rare performance.
JULY 23: The U.S. premiere of Francesco Conti's Don Quixote in Sierra Morena, a 1719 hit that satirizes heroic opera.
AUGUST 8: The great pianist and teacher Russell Sherman plays a spectacular Liszt recital.
'CELEBRATE BROOKLYN!'
June 16-August 8, Prospect Park Bandshell, 9th Street and Prospect Park West, Brooklyn, 718.855.7882, ext. 45, celebratebrooklyn.org
JULY 10:Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra to perform Ellis Island: Dream of America with readings by Blair Brown and Barry Bostwick
'GLIMMERGLASS OPERA'
Alice Busch Opera Theater, 7300 State Highway 80, Cooperstown, New York, 607.547.2255, glimmerglass.org
JULY 1-AUGUST 24:Here's an opera festival where the beauty of central New York State competes with fresh yet experienced vocal and production talents. My favorite Puccini, La Fanciulla del West, gets 11 performances July 1 through August 23, with the intense Emily Pulley as the heroine. The G&S gem Patience shows up 12 times from July 2 through August 24. Handel's sophisticated rarity, Imeneo, appears 11 times July 17 through August 21. And July 24 through August 22, Richard Rodney Bennett's 1965 thriller, The Mines of Sulphur, takes the stage nine times in its first professional U.S. production. (Juilliard did nicely by it about 35 years ago.)
'LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL 2004'
Various venues at Lincoln Center, Broadway and 65th Street, 212.875.5766, lincolncenter.org
JULY 6-25:This year's July binge is stingy about "serious" music, although the Frederick Ashton centennial tribute will help, and for that turn to this guide's dance page. Meanwhile, non-Ashton "serious" begins on July 17 at Avery Fisher Hall, where the Brooklyn Philharmonic plays the North American premiere of Elvis Costello's (yes!) ballet score, Il Sogno, which holds jazzy, folky, and slightly modern musical mirrors up to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
JULY 6-25:On July 22 through 24 in the Clark Studio Theater, 165 West 65th Street, there's Nicholas Brooke's Tone Test, a chamber opera based on Thomas Edison's debatable demostrations of how closely his phonograph cylinders matched the human singing voice. But the biggest to-do will probably be the North Anerican premiere of militant mystic John Tavener's seven-hour The Veil of the Temple, in which choruses, organ, and Eastern instruments take over Avery Fisher Hall, July 24 at 10:30 p.m., and finish at sunrise, when food awaits you on Josie Robertson Plaza.
'LINCOLN CENTER OUT OF DOORS FESTIVAL 2004'
August 10-30, Damrosch Park, 62nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue; South Plaza, 62nd Street behind New York State Theater; North Plaza, north of Metropolitan Opera House; Josie Robertson Plaza, Columbus Avenue and 64th Street; 212.875.5766, lincolncenter.org
AUGUST 10 'Taiwan Thunder': Ju Percussion Group (North Plaza)
AUGUST 11 'An Evening With Tibet': Nawang Khechog+Mystical Arts of Tibet's Drepung Loseling Monastery Choir (Damrosch Park Bandshell)
AUGUST 15 'Ensemble East': Shakuhachi and Koto (North Plaza)
AUGUST 18 Gerard Edery Ensemble & George Mgrdichian (North Plaza)
AUGUST 18 Fujian Xuan Zhou Gaojia Opera Group (Damrosch Park Bandshell)
'MET IN THE PARKS'
Various venues, 212.362.6000, metopera.org
JUNE 15-26:The Met's annual series of free, no- tickets-needed concert performances begins with two nights on Central Park's Great Lawn. First is Verdi's Nabucco, with Mark Delavan in the title role. June 16 brings Julius Rudel conducting an experienced cast in Puccini's Madama Butterfly. These operas alternate, with some cast changes, in Brookdale Park, Montclair, New Jersey; Buccleuch Park, New Brunswick, New Jersey; Pelham Bay Park, Bronx; Cunningham Park, Queens; Marine Park, Brooklyn; and Richmond County Bank Ballpark, Staten Island.
'MOSTLY MOZART FESTIVAL'
Avery Fisher Hall and other venues at Lincoln Center, Broadway and 65th Street, 212.875.5766, lincolncenter.org
JULY 29-AUGUST 28:For the first time in many years, this festival is indeed mostly Mozart, with a lively but not overbearing variety of Bach, Haydn, Schubert, and so on. Staged opera returns with Jonathan Miller's latest concept of Mozart's sublime Così fan tutte (August 10, 12, and 14). There's once again modern dance to Mozart and others (August 19 through 28). But a new element is a series of films showing great 20th-century pianists dealing mostly with Mozart (August 16 and 23 at the Walter Reade Theater).
