Bard College

(Airs 11/03/23 @ 10 p.m.) The Legislative Gazette is a weekly program about New York State Government and politics. On this week’s Gazette: A state senate hearing lawmakers hear complaints about flaws in the legal cannabis rollout, State Assembly member Glick on the need for more legislation to protect the environment, and advocates raise the alarm over new possible anchorages in the Hudson River.

Founded in 1990, the Bard Music Festival has established its unique identity in the classical concert field by presenting programs that, through performance and discussion, place selected works in the cultural and social context of the composer’s world.This year’s festival – the 33rd – will present an exploration of the life and work of English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Saint-Saëns’s opera "Henry VIII" will run as part of the 20th Bard SummerScape, July 21–30, in the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center at Bard. This, the first fully staged production of Henry III in the United States will be sung in French with English supertitles. Leon Botstein conducts the American Symphony Orchestra.Internationally acclaimed stage director Jean-Romain Vesperini helms the production at Bard and he joins us.

The Fisher Center at Bard, currently celebrating its 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground, will present its 16th year of Spiegeltent programming for Bard SummerScape 2023. The Spiegeltent, installed annually on the Bard grounds, serves as a platform for cutting-edge live music, performance, dancing, and more.Caleb Hammons is Fisher Center Director of Artistic Planning and Producing and he joins us with a Spiegeltent season preview.

Researchers at the Bard Center for the Study of Hate have released a new report that examines the annual economic impact of hate crimes in the United States.

Bard College in New York’s Dutchess County is using a $50 million endowment to broaden its work in Native American and Indigenous Studies. A $25 million gift from the Gochman Family Foundation and a matching $25 million commitment from the Open Society Foundations will fund scholarships for Native American and Indigenous students as well as faculty positions and programming. Bard College’s American Studies Program will also be renamed American and Indigenous Studies.

Bard SummerScape returns this year with eight weeks of live music, opera, dance, and theater. Highlights include the 32nd Bard Music Festival “Rachmaninoff and His World;” a new production of Strauss’s The Silent Woman, directed by Christian Räth; a World Premiere commission from Pam Tanowitz and David Lang; a new adaptation of Molière’s Dom Juan, directed by Ashley Tata; and more. Gideon Lester is Artistic Director of the Fisher Center at Bard and Senior Curator at the Open Society University Network’s Center for the Arts and Human Rights. A festival director, creative producer, and dramaturg, he has collaborated with and commissioned a broad range of American and international artists across disciplines.

Frederic C. Hof was the chief architect and mediator of the 2009–11 US initiative to broker peace between Israel and Syria. This mission was the culmination of Hof’s nearly three decades of public service, which began as a US Army officer in Vietnam and continued at the State Department. After a period in the private sector, he returned to the State Department, where, in 2012, he was awarded the rank of ambassador by President Obama. In 2018, after five years at the Atlantic Council, Hof was named the inaugural Diplomat-in-Residence at Bard College in upstate New York, where he resides with his wife, Brenda. Hof is the recipient of the Purple Heart and numerous other awards from the Department of Defense and the State Department.This important and eye-opening book is an insider’s account of secret negotiations to broker a Syria-Israel peace deal―negotiations that came tantalizingly close to success. Ambassador Frederic Hof, who spearheaded the US-mediated discussions in 2009-11, takes readers behind the scenes in Washington, Damascus, and Jerusalem, where President Assad and Prime Minister Netanyahu inched toward a deal to return Israeli-occupied areas of the Golan Heights in exchange for Syria severing military ties with Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Hof’s candid assessments, refreshing self-criticism, compelling prose, and rich historical detail make this a masterful memoir of an unknown chapter in American diplomacy.

The US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music presents The Sound of Spring: A Chinese New Year Concert conducted by Director of the US-China Music Institute Jindong Cai.This special annual event, marking one of the most important holidays in the Chinese lunar calendar, showcases some of the best Chinese American artists and solo artists in America today, Chinese music, and traditional instruments. This year’s concert will celebrate the Chinese Year of the Tiger.Performances will take place on Friday, January 28, 2022 at 8pm in The Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at BardCollege and on Sunday, January 30, 2022 at 3pm in the Rose Theater of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall in New York City.Conductor Jindong Cai is the director of the US-China Music Institute, professor of music and arts at Bard College, and associate conductor of Bard’s The Orchestra Now. Over the 30 years of his career in the United States, Cai has established himself as an active and dynamic conductor, scholar of Western classical music in China, and leading advocate of music from across Asia.

James Romm is an author, reviewer, and the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College in Annandale, New York.In his new book, "The Sacred Band," Romm dives into the last decades of ancient Greek freedom leading up to Alexander the Great’s destruction of Thebes and the saga of the greatest military corps of the age, the Theban Sacred Band, a unit composed of 150 pairs of male lovers.