Music, like all art, engages the mind and the heart.
The mission of the Bard College Conservatory of Music is to provide the best possible preparation for a person dedicated to a life immersed in the creation and performance of music.
A dual opera performance featuring Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amelia Goes to the Ball and Giacomo Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, performed by the Bard College Conservatory of Music and Graduate Vocal Arts Program, was reviewed in the Millbrook Independent. “Both witty operettas celebrate skillful women in a male-dominated society,” wrote Kevin McEneaney.
With a voice described as “honey-coloured and warm, yet robust and commanding” (The Globe and Mail), baritone Tyler Duncan has performed worldwide to great acclaim in both opera and concert repertoire. Throughout his varied career, he has performed with several of the world’s leading orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Tafelmusik, Minnesota Orchestra, and the Kansas City Symphony.
Mr. Duncan recently performed the role of Count Almaviva in Pacific Opera Victoria's production of The Marriage of Figaro, C.P.E. Bach’s Magnificat with the Handel and Haydn Society, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Bach’s St. John and St. Matthew Passions with the Oregon Bach Festival and Haydn’s Creation Mass with Music of the Baroque. Other notable engagements include Handel’s Messiah with Houston Symphony, New Jersey Symphony and Symphony Nova Scotia; Handel’s Theodora with Trinity Wall St at Caramoor; Handel's Apollo e Dafne and Bach’s Ich habe genug with Arizona Early Music’s Tucson Baroque Music Festival; Brahms’ Requiem with Johnstown Symphony; and concerts with Bard Music Festival, Brooklyn Art Song Society and Aspect Chamber Music. He also returned to the roster of The Metropolitan Opera for their new production of Terence Blanchard’s Champion.
Mr. Duncan has performed numerous roles at The Metropolitan Opera including Fiorello in Il barbiere di Siviglia, Moralès in Carmen, Prince Yamadori in Madama Butterfly, and the Journalist in Lulu. At the Spoleto Festival USA, he debuted as Mr. Friendly in the 18th-century ballad opera Flora, returning the next season as Sprecher in Die Zauberflöte. Other notable appearances have included Raymondo in Handel’s Almira, Dandini in La Cenerentola with Pacific Opera Victoria and Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Princeton Festival. In the realm of new opera, he recently performed the role of Raymond in Nic Gotham’s Nigredo Hotel with City Opera Vancouver and sang the world premiere of Jonathan Berger’s Leonardo at the 92stY in NYC.
Concert credits include Stravinsky’s Canticum Sacrum with San Francisco Symphony; Messiah with New York Philharmonic and the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa; Mahler’s 8th Symphony and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra; Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium with the Minnesota Orchestra; Beethoven’s Mass in C with Kansas City Symphony; Schubert Lieder at the Wigmore Hall with pianist Graham Johnson; Bach’s Ich habe genug with Les Violins du Roy; Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn with Lviv Philharmonic; a selection of Bach Cantatas and Jeffery Ryan’s Afghanistan Requiem with Calgary Philharmonic; Orff’s Carmina Burana with Quebec Symphony and San Diego Symphony; Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte with Vancouver Symphony; Bach’s St. Matthew Passion with Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra; and Shostakovich’s Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti with The Orchestra Now at the Met Museum. He has also performed at the Händel Festival in Halle, Verbier Festival, Bard Festival, Vancouver Early Music Festival, Montreal Bach Festival, Oregon Bach Festival, Grant Park Festival, Lanaudière Festival, Berkshire Choral Festival, and New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival.
Frequently paired with pianist Erika Switzer, Mr. Duncan has given acclaimed recitals in New York, Boston, Chicago, Paris, and throughout Canada, Germany, Sweden, France, and South Africa. Together they have premiered many new works written for them by composers. Alongside their debut album English Songs à la française for Bridge Records, they have released A Left Coast on the same label featuring songs from Canada's west coast.
Notable recordings include the Juno Award winning Vaughan-Williams Serenade to Music with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Earthquakes and Islands: an album of songs by Andrew Staniland with texts by Robin Richardson, the title role in John Blow’s Venus and Adonis with Boston Early Music Festival, J.S. Bach’s St. John Passion with the Portland Baroque Orchestra, and is featured with the Montreal Symphony in a video recording of Handel’s Messiah.
Mr. Duncan has received prizes from the Naumburg, London’s Wigmore Hall, and Munich’s ARD competitions, and won the Joy in Singing competition, the New York Oratorio Society’s Lyndon Woodside Oratorio-Solo Competition, the Prix International Pro Musicis Award, and the Bernard Diamant Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts. Mr. Duncan earned music degrees from the University of British Columbia, Hochschule für Musik (Augsburg), and Hochschule für Musik und Theater (Munich). As a current faculty member for the Vocal Arts Program at Bard College, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and as director of voice for the historical performance program at Case Western Reserve University, he finds joy in helping the next generation of singers find their true voice. Originally from British Columbia, Canada, Mr. Duncan now resides in the scenic Hudson Valley of New York. You may find him frequenting roadside farmstands seeking the perfect, freshly picked apple.
Tao Chen
Dizi
Tao Chen
Chen Tao is an internationally acclaimed Chinese flutist, music educator, composer, and conductor of Chinese orchestra; founder and director of Melody of Dragon, Inc., and of Melody of Dragon & the Youth; artistic director and conductor of the Chinese Music Ensemble of New York and conductor of New Jersey Buddha’s Light Youth Chinese Orchestra; artistic director of New York Guqin Association; and executive chairman of the New York Chinese Music Instruments International Competition since 2015. He is also a 27th-generation musician of Zhi-Hua Buddhism music. The New York Times called Chen Tao a “poet in music” and his playing “a miracle of the oriental flute.” Conductor Herbert von Karajan praised him as an artist who “performs with his soul.”
A graduate of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, Chen Tao was the winner of the 1989 National Folk Instrument Competition in China and has toured the United States, Germany, Italy, France, England, Holland, Singapore, and elsewhere. He has collaborated with the BBC Philharmonic and National Orchestra of Lyon. His playing can be heard on soundtracks of Hollywood movies including Seven Years in Tibet, Corrupter (with the New York Philharmonic) and on the PBS documentary Under the Red Flag. Since coming to the United States in 1993, Chen Tao has been invited to perform and lecture throughout the country. His second Flute Recital was performed in Carnegie Hall by the New York Flute Club in 2001. He has performed at Lincoln Center and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center with groups such as the Manhattan School of Music’s Chamber Orchestra, Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company, and H. T. Chen Dancers. China Institute in America has invited him to perform and lecture on the Chinese flute since 1995. The World Journal and Tsingtao Daily have called him “king of the flute.”
As a music educator, Chen Tao has been leading Melody of Dragon in collaboration with the Midori & Friends Foundation to develop Chinese music culture in elementary schools and high schools throughout the New York metropolitan area.
Leigh Mesh
Double Bass Masterclasses
Leigh Mesh
Leigh Mesh, associate principal double bass, joined the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in 1993. A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, he began his professional career with the Columbus Symphony Orchestra and later played with the Indianapolis and Chicago Symphony Orchestras. He has taught master classes at the New World Symphony in Miami, Cincinnati Conservatory, Juilliard School, and Manhattan School of Music. Mr. Mesh is the double bass coach of the UBS Verbier Festival Youth Orchestra in Verbier, Switzerland. He has been a guest artist with the Verbier Festival, Linton Chamber Music Series, Pensacola Classicfest, Chamber Music Society of Martha’s Vineyard,Mainly Mozart Festival in San Diego, and the Salt Bay Chamberfest. Mr. Mesh has performed with the MET Chamber Ensemble, the Caramoor Virtuosi, and the Brentano and Tokyo String Quartets. Mr. Mesh was a faculty member of the Colburn School of Music in Los Angeles during the 2009–2010 school year. He joined the faculty of the Bard College Conservatory of Music in the fall of 2010. He lives with his wife, Nancy Wu, associate concertmaster of the MET Opera Orchestra, and their two children, Guinevere and Wolfram, in Pleasantville, New York. He pursues cycling and skiing whenever he can. Mr. Mesh is an exclusive artist for Thomastik-Infeld Strings.
Elaine Fitz Gibbon
German Language and Translation
Elaine Fitz Gibbon
Elaine Fitz Gibbon is a doctoral candidate in Historical Musicology at Harvard University. She received her MA in German Studies from Princeton, and her BA in Musicology and German Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She also holds a Diploma of Advanced Studies in music journalism from the Musik Akademie Basel and has been active as a journalist in the field of new music in the German speaking realm. Her dissertation, which focuses on the music-conceptual work of the Argentine German composer Mauricio Kagel, explores trends and relations of opera, music theater and electro-acoustic music of the avant-garde from 1945 to today from the perspective of circum-Atlantic migration and mobility. Fitz Gibbon has published translations of texts by Bernd Alois Zimmermann for The Opera Quarterly (2014) and Hans Merian for Princeton University Press (Puccini and His World, 2015). Her article, “Beethoven Returns to Bonn: Origins, Belonging and Misuse in Mauricio Kagel’s Ludwig van (1969),” was published in Current Musicology (107) in 2021 and her chapter on the music notational practices of conceptual artist Hanne Darboven recently appeared in the volume Material Cultures of Music Notation (Routledge, 2022). An interview with the Irish composer Jennifer Walshe (b. 1974) is forthcoming in The Opera Quarterly. In her free time, Fitz Gibbon enjoys playing chamber music on modern and Baroque cellos.