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09
SA
AUGUST 2025


Bard Music Festival | Program Two | The French Connection

Martinů came of age as a composer in the musical melting pot of Paris, where his Czech influences would absorb more international ones. This program examines the worlds that shaped him, contextualizing the composer among his teachers and peers. These include Jaroslav Řídký, with whom he had played in the Czech Philharmonic, and their teacher Josef Suk, whose youthful yet confident First Piano Quartet is dedicated to Suk’s own teacher (and soon-to-be father-in-law), Antonín Dvořák. Two of Martinů’s earliest Parisian works—the ragtimey Foxtrot and assured First Piano Trio—will be heard alongside chamber works by his teacher Albert Roussel, one of the most prominent French composers of the interwar years; the Polish émigré Alexandre Tansman, like Martinů a leading light of the so-called École de Paris; and their elder luminary Maurice Ravel, whose writing would influence the Czech composer’s string quartets.

Program

1 pm • Preconcert talk: Byron Adams
1:30 pm • Performance: Taylor Raven, mezzo-soprano; Brandon Patrick George, flute; Thomas English, bassoon; Michael Stephen Brown, Danny Driver, & Erika Switzer, piano; Luosha Fang, violin; and others

Jaroslav Řídký (1897–1956)
Alla Polka (1933)

Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959)
String Trio No. 1, H136 (1923)

Alexandre Tansman (1897–1986)
Bassoon Sonatina (1956)

Bohuslav Martinů
Flute Sonata, H306 (1945)
Foxtrot for piano, H126b (1920)

Albert Roussel (1869–1937)
Jazz dans la nuit, Op. 38 (1929)

Maurice Ravel (1875–1937)
Violin Sonata No. 2 in G Major (1927)

Josef Suk (1874–1935)
Piano Quartet No. 1 in A Minor, Op. 1 (1891)

Ticekts: https://session.fc.bard.edu/3454/3436