Organization

Bard Music Festival

Conductor

Leon Botstein

Stage director

Alison Moritz

Set designer

Lawrence E. Moten, III

Lighting designer

Abigail Hoke-Brady

Costume designer

Neil Fortin

Singer

Tenor

William Ferguson

Shallow

Baritone

Theo Hoffman

Sir Hugh Evans

Martin Luther Clark

Slender

Maximillian Jansen

Simple

Troy Cook

Master George Page

Craig Colclough

Sir John

Julius Ahn

Bardolph

Tyler Duncan

Corporal Nym

Bass

Kevin Thompson

Ancient Pistol

Soprano

Brandie Sutton

Anne Page

Ann Toomey

Mrs Page

Sarah Saturnino

Mrs Ford

Joshua Blue

Fenton

John Brancy

Dr Caius

Justin Hopkins

Rugby

Contralto

Lucy Schaufer

Mistress Quickly

Lucia Lucas

Host

William Socolof

Ford

Orchestra

American Symphony Orchestra

Fisher Center at Bard

Others

Bard Festival Chorale

Program Eleven - Vaughan Williams and Shakespeare: Sir John in Love

Annandale

United States

Fisher Center

Sosnoff Theater

Public

Private

Sir John in Love

Approved

Sir John in Love Vaughan Williams

Program Eleven presents Vaughan Williams’ opera, Sir John in Love, in a semi-staged production by American director Alison Moritz, whose projects have been called “raw, funny, surreal, and disarmingly human” (Opera News). Anchored by the American Symphony Orchestra, it is with this rare American presentation of Vaughan Williams’s opera that the 2023 Bard Music Festival draws to a satisfying close.

Marking the 400th anniversary of the First Folio, the first published collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Vaughan Williams was a great lover of the poet’s work, and it was reportedly “entirely for his own enjoyment” that he based a comic opera on The Merry Wives of Windsor. Shakespeare’s comedy was also the inspiration for Verdi’s Falstaff, but unlike the Italian composer, Vaughan Williams had the advantage of writing in English, and his plot and libretto adhere closely to Shakespeare’s original. Despite this, the resulting opera has only rarely been staged, with no UK performances between 1958 and 2005, and no U.S. premiere until 2015. Such neglect reflects no artistic deficiencies, however. Boasting a score rich with folksongs and Elizabethan melodies, including “Lovely Joan” and “Greensleeves,” Sir John in Love features some of Vaughan Williams’s finest writing. As BBC Music observes:

“The score reveals the composer as a master of comic opera, deftly intercutting Shakespeare’s intricate word-play with the chromatically searching manner of works from the 1920s like the Pastoral Symphony or Flos Campi. Everything is drawn together in scintillating style, and the best moments … are from an exceptional vintage in Vaughan Williams’s creativity.”

English

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