GREAT BARRINGTON - Leon Botstein will present a lecture on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Don Giovanni†on Monday, February 14, at 7 p.m., at Simon’s Rock College of Bard. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held in the McConnell Theater.
Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and Simon’s Rock College, is also music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra. He conducts the orchestra’s subscription season at Avery Fisher Hall as part of Lincoln Center Presents Great Performers, and with the American Symphony Chamber Orchestra and Classics Declassified, he presents an educational concert series for adult listeners at Miller Theatre, Columbia University.
His latest recordings with the ASO are a highly acclaimed live concert performance of Richard Strauss’s opera Die Liebe der Danae with soprano Lauren Flanigan for Telarc, and music of Ernst von Dohnányi, forthcoming from Arabesque. His other recordings with the ASO include Brahms’s First Serenade (Vanguard) and Franz Schubert: Orchestrated, orchestrations of Schubert works by Joachim, Mottl, and Webern (Koch). In 1998 he led the ASO on a tour to Brazil to inaugurate São Paulo’s new concert hall.
Leon Botstein is also the founder and co-artistic director of the Bard Music Festival, an annual series of events where the musical world of a single composer is explored. He is artistic director of the American Russian Young Artists Orchestra, a collaboration with Bard College that brings together young musicians from both countries who rehearse and tour together in the United States and Russia.
As a guest conductor, Botstein has led such orchestras as the London Philharmonic, London Philharmonia, NDR–Hannover, Düsseldorf Symphony, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Bochum Symphony, Israel Sinfonietta, Jerusalem Symphony, Bern Symphony, and Budapest Festival Orchestra. In a series of recordings for Telarc, Botstein has led the London Philharmonic in Max Reger’s Böcklin Tone Poems and Romantic Suite, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, and music of Karol Szymanowski. His most recent recording with the London Symphony Orchestra, Gliere’s Symphony No. 3, “Ilya Muramets,†will be released later this year.
Botstein is a writer on music and history, and in 1996 received Harvard’s prestigious Centennial Medal for his scholarly work. He has published extensively on music and culture for numerous collections and journals; he is the editor of The Musical Quarterly and a contributor to the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. His edited volume, The Compleat Brahms, was published by Norton in 1999. He is currently working on a book on the history of listening. Since 1975 he has been president of Bard College, where he is also Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities.
A background on the Seminar Lectures at Simon’s Rock College
This event is part of the Seminar Lectures, a series which supplements courses that first and second year students are required to take, “First Year Seminar: The Examined Life,†and the “Sophomore Seminar: Voices Against the Chorus.â€
“The First Year Seminar: The Examined Life†is a two-semester course that focuses on themes of self-discovery, the relationship of the individual and society, and the nature of values and responsibility. Readings for the course include Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle, Plato’s The Last Days of Socrates, Dante’s Inferno, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and a wide variety of supplementary works.
“The Sophomore Seminar: Voices Against the Chorus†explores how 19th- and 20th-century thinkers confronted the accepted order of things, how they challenged accepted ideas, and how they constructed radically different conceptions of the world. Readings include Darwin’s The Descent of Man, Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Forster’s A Passage to India, DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Kafka’s The Trial.
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Former Harry's Supermarket Under Construction for Restaurant
Late last month, the Conservation Commission greenlit some tree pruning on the property. New windows and a new door can be seen in the front of the building.
"It's a substantial renovation that's currently underway here," Brent White of White Engineering said, speaking on behalf of the applicant and owner, Huajie Zhu.
A fire gutted the longtime Wahconah Street supermarket in 2023, and the following year, Zhu purchased the property for $460,000 two years ago to build a restaurant with hibachi in the existing footprint of the more than 100-year-old building.
White explained that the project has been ongoing for over a year, and the Community Development Board granted the property a waiver to reduce the minimum required number of parking spaces so that additional spaces aren't needed.
He noted that, looking at the site plan, there is very little room to do so. A mirror will be installed near the sharp turn on Bel Air Avenue to alleviate traffic concerns.
Pruning will be done on trees in the southeast corner of the existing paved parking lot, as a number of branches are hanging over. The new owners also intend to patch, sealcoat, and re-stripe the parking lot.
A fire tore through the building less than an hour after the supermarket closed for the day three years ago. An automatic sprinkler system is required for the new use.
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