Fisher Center at Bard

A semi-staged concert performance of Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, featuring the American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein, the Bard Festival Chorale, and soloists Jana McIntyre, Catherine Creed, Minghao Liu, Aaron Blake, and Harold Wilson.

After opening with Mozart’s somber Masonic Funeral Music in C minor, Program Seven, “Beauty, Charity, and Reason,” complements Michael Haydn’s Mass with two of Mozart’s own religious choral works, both of which draw on his devotion to Freemasonry. The program concludes with an all-too-rare live account of his Davide penitente, a cantata combining a specially created cadenza and two new arias with original text settings of his personally selected highlights from the unfinished Great Mass in C minor.

A hypnotic blend of myth, melodrama, and psychological intrigue, Richard Strauss’s seldom heard The Egyptian Helen (Die ägyptische Helena) receives a lavish, rare U.S. staging at Bard SummerScape.