The New York Times
By Michael Cooper, February 16, 2015
The music of Carlos Chávez, a key 20th-century Mexican composer whose works blended modern, folk and pre-Columbian influences, will be explored this summer at the Bard SummerScape Festival in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., the festival announced Monday.
The festival, which runs from June 25 through Aug. 16, will devote its last two weekends to a program called “Chávez and His World,” devoted to his music and that of other 20th-century Latin American composers. Some of Chávez’s best-known works — including his “Sinfonía india” and “H.P.,” a ballet symphony — will be played, along with works by Silvestre Revueltas, Alberto Ginastera, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and an overview of Mexican choral music.
The music will be performed by the American Symphony Orchestra, led by Leon Botstein, the ensemble’s music director and the president of Bard.
The festival will also present the first American staging of “The Wreckers,” which is considered the best opera by Dame Ethel Smyth, the composer, author and suffragette who died in 1944 at the age of 86. (Her one-act opera “Der Wald,” is the only work by a woman ever produced at the Metropolitan Opera; the Met plans to add another in its 2016-17 season when it is to stage Kaija Saariaho’s 2000 opera, “L’Amour de Loin.”
Mr. Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra gave “The Wreckers” its American premiere in 2007 at Avery Fisher Hall in a concert version; the performance at this summer’s festival is believed to be its first staged production in America. It is to be directed by Thaddeus Strassberger.
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