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.
The final performance of the festival, a chamber opera and dance concert by the Bard East/West Ensemble, will take place on October 5 at 3 pm at Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Dual Milestone Event Honors Bard College Conservatory’s 20th Anniversary and Leon Botstein’s 50th Year as President, Highlighting a Half-Century of Classical Music and Higher Education
Raymond Erickson, harpsichordist, pianist, and music historian, graduated with high honors from Whittier College and holds the Ph.D. in musicology from Yale. He is one of America’s most experienced teachers of historical performance practice, having taught the subject since the mid-1970s at Queens College’s Aaron Copland School of Music and the CUNY Graduate Center (DMA program), as well as Rutgers University. In his performances all over the US and Europe, on both harpsichord and piano, he has revived once-standard practices now largely forgotten, such as improvised preludizing and embellishments. In recent years, he has focused on Bach, and has given master classes and lectures on Bach interpretation at major conservatories and universities both here and abroad. He has published non-traditional but historically-based interpretive approaches to the Bach Ciaccona for solo violin and to the classic repertory, as well as on improvisation for classical musicians. His four books include Schubert’s Vienna (Yale, 1997) and The Worlds of Johann Sebastian Bach (Amadeus, 2009), both of which are outgrowths of the Aston Magna Academy program he directed, sponsored by the Aston Magna Foundation with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Erickson’s principal keyboard teachers were pianists Margaretha Lohmann and Nadia Reisenberg and harpsichordists Ralph Kirkpatrick and Albert Fuller.
Rieko Aizawa
Piano
Rieko Aizawa
Praised by the NY Times for an “impressive musicality, a crisp touch and expressive phrasing,” Japanese pianist Rieko Aizawa has performed throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe, including at New York City’s Lincoln Center, Boston's Symphony Hall, Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, and London’s Wigmore Hall.
At the age of thirteen, Ms. Aizawa was brought to the attention of conductor Alexander Schneider on the recommendation of the pianist Mitsuko Uchida. Schneider engaged Ms. Aizawa as soloist with his Brandenburg Ensemble at the opening concerts of Tokyo's Casals Hall. Later that year, Schneider presented her in U.S. début concerts at the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall with his New York String Orchestra. She has since established her own unique musical voice.
Highlights have included acclaimed performances with the New Japan Philharmonic under Seiji Ozawa, the English Chamber Orchestra under Heinz Holliger, the Festival Strings Lucerne in Switzerland under Rudolf Baumgartner, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra under Hugh Wolff, the Curtis Institute Orchestra with Peter Oundjian, the St. Louis Symphony under David Loebel and a wonderfully received performance with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra. Ms. Aizawa also has a great interest in exploring unusual repertoire. The St. Paul Pioneer Press described her performance with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra conducted by Hans Graf "the Salieri Piano Concerto in C was played so splendidly by Rieko Aizawa. Hers was a graceful reading. .... Aizawa's performance lent the work a respect it rarely receives." In the same year, she received the Washington Award.
As a recitalist, Ms. Aizawa has been heard in many North American cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, St. Louis, Seattle, Boulder, Los Angeles, Houston, and Toronto; at the Caramoor International Festival; at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival; Ravinia Festival, and the Gilmore Keyboard Festival. Following her all-Beethoven program recital in Dresden, Germany, a reviewer wrote: "Her listeners followed her playing -- full of details and delicate contrasts -- breathlessly." Ms. Aizawa gave her "Prism" series in Japan, with tributes to Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann, and specially commissioned works for each program by Akira Nishimura, Dan Coleman and Toshiro Saruya. She also had a project performing a Beethoven Piano Sonata cycle at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Ms. Aizawa performed a series of all- Mozart recitals, a project which was jointly presented by WFMT-Chicago and PianoForte Chicago. Ms. Aizawa’s solo debut recording of Scriabin’s and Shostakovich’s “24 Preludes” was released by Altus in Japan, and her second album of Messiaen's and Faure's preludes is coming out in the upcoming season.
Ms. Aizawa is also an active chamber musician. The youngest-ever participant at the Marlboro Music Festival, she has performed as a guest with string quartets such as the Guarneri Quartet and the Orion Quartet. She has appeared in numerous festivals, such as the Marlboro Music Festival; Bowdoin Festival; the Kammermusik Festival of Moritzburg, Germany; and the Evian Festival, France. She also has been a guest artist of Boston's, Philadelphia's and Seattle's Chamber Music Societies. She is a founding member of the prize-winning Duo Prism and of the Horszowski Trio, which honors the legacy of her teacher.
As a member of the Horszowski Trio, acclaimed as “the most compelling American group to come on the scene” by the New Yorker, Ms. Aizawa has recently made debuts at the 92nd St. Y in NYC, and at Wigmore Hall in London. The trio recorded the complete Robert Schumann piano trios on AVIE Records and the album was featured by Gramophone as an “exemplary performance.” Currently, they are celebrating their 10th Anniversary season with a project which takes inspiration from Schumann, commissioning three American composers from different generations: Paul Chihara, Derek Bermel and David Fulmer.
Ms. Aizawa was the last pupil of Mieczyslaw Horszowski at the Curtis Institute and she also studied with Seymour Lipkin and Peter Serkin at the Juilliard School. She lives in New York City, and she is on the faculty at the Longy School of Music of Bard College and at Brooklyn College. She became artistic director of the Alpenglow Chamber Music Festival in Colorado in 2010.
Director and Faculty, Bard College Conservatory of Music
Frank Corliss
Frank Corliss is the director of the Bard College Conservatory of Music. Prior to coming to Bard he was for many years a staff pianist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and the director of music at the Walnut Hill School for the Arts. He was a frequent performer on the Boston Symphony Prelude Concert series and he has also performed throughout the United States as a chamber musician and collaborative pianist. Corliss has worked as a musical assistant for Yo-Yo Ma and has assisted Ma in the musical preparation of many new works for performance and recording, including concertos by Elliot Carter, Richard Danielpour, Tan Dun, John Harbison, Leon Kirchner, Peter Lieberson, Christopher Rouse, and John Williams.
A graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, he received his Master of Music from SUNY at Stony Brook, where he studied with Gilbert Kalish. While at Oberlin he received the Rudolf Serkin Award for Outstanding Pianist and was a member of the Music from Oberlin Ensemble, which toured throughout the U.S. He has also studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria, and the Cracow Academy of Music in Cracow, Poland. Mr. Corliss has participated in several summer festivals, including the Tanglewood Music Festival and the Taos Chamber Music Festival and the Aspen Music Festival.
He was appointed as an Artistic Ambassador for the United States Information Agency and in that capacity went on a three-week concert tour of Eastern Europe. He was also the recipient of a Rockefeller grant from the Cultural Contact US-Mexico Fund for Culture to commission works for flute and piano by American and Mexican composers and premiered in Boston and in Mexico City.
Mr. Corliss can be heard in recording on Yo Yo Ma’s Grammy-winning SONY disc “Soul of the Tango”, as well as the Koch International disc of music by Elliot Carter for chorus and piano with the John Oliver Chorale.
Weigang Li
Violin Masterclasses
Weigang Li
Born into a family of well-known musicians in Shanghai, Weigang Li began studying the violin with his parents when he was 5 and went on to attend the Shanghai Conservatory Middle School at age 14. Three years later, in 1981, he was selected to go to study for one year at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music through the first cultural exchange program between the sister cities of Shanghai and San Francisco. in 1985, upon graduating from the Shanghai Conservatory, Weigang Li left China to continue his studies at Northern Illinois University and later studied and taught at the Juilliard School. Besides his parents, other important teachers have included Shmuel Ashkenasi, Robert Mann, Tan Shu-Chen and Isadore Tinkleman.
Mr. Li was featured in the 1980 Oscar winning documentary film From Mao to Mozart: IsaacStern in China. He made his solo debut at 17 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and has appeared as soloist with Shanghai Symphony, China Philharmonic, BBC Scottish Symphony and Asian Youth Orchestra.
Weigang Li is a founding member and first violinist of the world-renowned Shanghai Quartet since 1983. Now in its 37th season, the Shanghai Quartet has performed nearly 3000 concerts in 35 countries and recorded over 30 CD albums, including a highly acclaimed 7-disc set of complete Beethoven String Quartets.
Weigang Li is a violin professor at Bard College Conservatory of Music, Tianjin Juilliard School, and Montclair State University. He also holds the title of guest concert-master of Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, guest professor at both Shanghai Conservatory of Music and Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing.
Mr. Li plays on a Antonio Stradivari golden period violin the 'Kneisel, Grün' made in Cremona in 1714, which is on a generous loan from J. A. Beare International Violin Society.