Music and Freedom

Presented by the Bard Music Festival

The 2025 Bard Music Festival examines the life and times of Bohuslav Martinů, the 20th century’s foremost Czech composer, whose music is nonetheless largely unfamiliar to U.S. audiences today.

Martinů’s life was upended by the Nazi invasion, but his compatriot Erwin Schulhoff, a Jewish Communist, suffered the worse fate of dying in a concentration camp. Drawing on influences from neoclassicism to jazz, Schulhoff’s commanding Second Symphony opens this program, the festival’s first all-orchestral concert.

Martinů’s masterly and original Fourth Piano Concerto, “Incantation,” was dedicated to his great friend and fellow exile, the concert pianist – and subsequent mentor to Leon Botstein – Rudolf Firkušný, whose own Piano Concertino receives just its third performance to date. Two more of Martinů’s own works complete the program: the Memorial to Lidice, a searing symphonic response to the Nazis’ annihilation of a Czech village, and his Sixth and final Symphony (Fantaisies symphoniques). Written to celebrate the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 75th anniversary, this was recognized with the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award and represents one of the pinnacles of his work in America.

Image: This is Nazi Brutality by Ben Shahn; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Jeremy and Nancy Halbreich.