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    For Classical Music, Every Summer Is a Liberation

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    During a time of year in which anything can be a stage, the joy of music making has room to breathe outdoors.A Philadelphia Orchestra concert at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.James Estrin/The New York TimesConsider classical music a late bloomer. In New York, as the city emerges from its winter hibernation — the snow on tree branches replaced by dreamily pastel cherry blossoms, the short, sleepy days extended by increasingly dramatic sunsets — performers tend to remain indoors. A concert in May doesn’t look so different from one in January.But then comes summer.Around early June, orchestras and opera companies close out their seasons, and music making begins to take on new, liberated forms. Instruments that seem so precious onstage make their way outdoors, suddenly looking as casual as the artists wielding them, who sometimes swap their formal concert attire for, well, whatever they want.Samantha Lake with Make Music New York, on Lexington Avenue.The Metropolitan Opera’s float at the New York City Pride March.The old-hat claims of classical music’s elitism and lack of approachability just don’t hold up in summer. Performances pop up as if out of thin air; the New York Philharmonic puts on a series of free outdoor shows that sprawl across the city’s boroughs; everyone, regardless of skill or expertise, is invited to take part in local celebrations for the global Fête de la Musique on the June 21 solstice.A Boston Symphony Orchestra concert at Tanglewood in Massachusetts.During this season, a singer from the Metropolitan Opera might appear on a makeshift stage or in a band shell, performing for passers-by and die-hard fans alike. Friends and families gather on picnic blankets to camp out, some for hours, and enjoy one another’s company, eat and play games before the day culminates in a Philharmonic concert played for thousands more people than could fit inside the orchestra’s home at Lincoln Center.The Met — an institution that throughout its history has been a haven for queer fans but only recently has represented people like them onstage — leaves its velveteen temple to let its hair down and celebrate Pride in the streets, complete with its own float, a mobile concert sung by the likes of the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and the mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe.A Death of Classical concert at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.Caramoor.Bard College.Anything, after all, can be a stage in the summer: a patch of grass, a barn, the catacombs of a cemetery. Music moves farther and farther away from concert halls, away from cities into the countryside and mountains. New Yorkers wind their way up the Hudson Valley to the bucolic grounds of Caramoor, or to the expansive lawns of Bard College and its sculptural, Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center.The Boston Symphony Orchestra, which in town has the air of a bastion of tradition, embraces the relaxed — and relaxing — grounds of its idyllic Tanglewood campus in the Berkshires. Students also stay there for the summer, exploring new music with monastic focus and learning from some of the finest artists in the field.The Met’s float at the Pride March.Pride in New York.Tanglewood.Joan Forsyth with Make Music New York.Things that would be unfathomable in a concert hall suddenly seem possible. The cannons of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” can be literal cannons. The joy of music making has room to breathe, inviting the sounds of nature to join in: a chorus of birds and insects, a roar of thunder, hopefully not the needy wail of a car alarm.A New York Philharmonic concert in Central Park.The Philharmonic’s concert.A Philadelphia Orchestra concert in Saratoga Springs.Soon, it won’t be so pleasant to lay out a picnic spread while waiting for the Philharmonic. As the trees shed their leaves and the sunsets come earlier, the concert hall will become a refuge. But come next summer, so will the outdoors. More

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      At 20, an Upstate Arts Haven Keeps Breaking New Ground

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      On a recent Saturday night, a group of young people were gathered in this bucolic hamlet in the Hudson Valley, building a campfire of sorts. There were no matches or flames, but there were lanterns, chirping crickets, fir trees swirled with haze and, at one point, a zombie attack.The ersatz campfire was onstage, at the final evening performance of “Illinois,” a dance-theater piece based on Sufjan Stevens’s beloved 2005 indie-pop concept album. Directed by the star choreographer Justin Peck, the show drew a sold-out crowd of arts-minded weekenders and curious Stevens fans to commune inside the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College.Since opening 20 years ago, the center’s Frank Gehry building has emerged as a hothouse for the creation of uncompromising, cross-disciplinary and sometimes hard to describe hits.It’s here that Daniel Fish’s radically reimagined “Oklahoma!” took shape before its unlikely run to Broadway (and a Tony Award for best musical revival), and here that the choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s “Four Quartets” (praised in The New York Times as “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century”) was sparked by a random breakfast conversation.Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s artistic director and chief executive. “Just approaching an artist and saying, ‘Let’s do something together,’ is the thing that excites me most in the world,” he said.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesGiven the personnel involved, “Illinois,” which will move to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater in January, would seem to have the makings of a popular hit. But for Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s artistic director and chief executive, it furthers the same exploratory mission as everything else the center does.“All of these projects are research, which is why they belong in a college,” he said. “What these artists are doing is investigating something, experimenting, creating something in a new way.”These are tenuous times for the performing arts, including in the Hudson Valley, where several independent institutions have curtailed programming or shuttered entirely. But the Fisher Center, nestled in a college long known as a bastion of the humanities, is making big plans.In October, it will break ground on a $42 million studio building designed by Maya Lin. And it just received a $2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the work of Tania El Khoury, an artist in residence and director of the school’s recently founded Center for Human Rights and the Arts.Gehry’s building, with its explosion of stainless steel whorls, is something of a symbol of the center’s discipline-scrambling programming. Each year, the center is home to full-scale productions of rarely performed operas (like Saint-Saëns’s “Henry VIII,” which opens on July 21) and theatrical world premieres (like Elevator Repair Service’s “Ulysses,” coming in September).The center has also hosted a live-art biennial, development workshops for Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo’s “Only an Octave Apart” and, during the pandemic shutdown, a streaming serial production of “Chapter & Verse,” Meshell Ndegeocello’s musical performance inspired by James Baldwin.Justin Peck, left, in rehearsal with Ahmad Simmons, a dancer in “Illinois.” Peck’s dance-theater piece is based on the 2005 indie-pop album by Sufjan Stevens.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesFrom left, Simmons, Tilly Evans-Krueger and Jonathan Fahoury. “I wanted to build a spaceship for all these dance artists to blast off in,” Peck said of “Illinois.”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesAs for “Illinois,” presented as part of the annual SummerScape festival, even those closest to it are hard-pressed to categorize it. Aaron Mattocks, the Fisher Center’s chief operating officer, called it a “genre blur.”For Peck, who came to the center with the idea about two years ago, it’s “a spaceship for all these dance astronauts to blast off in.”“I was looking for a place to go that felt somewhat quiet but also exciting, and a place that had felt willing to take risks on something like this,” Peck said.The Fisher Center opened in 2003 as a multifunctional performing arts center that would be home to the college’s teaching programs as well as the Bard Music Festival, allowing it to mount full-scale operas.The center has always presented theater and dance, too. But with Lester’s arrival in 2012, it has expanded its commissioning of original, contemporary-minded work.“What Gideon has done is brought to it a fantastic originality and an eye and ear for things that need doing, and then inspiring artists to do it,” Leon Botstein, Bard’s president, said.Jenny Gersten, a producer and the interim artistic director at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts, credited the Fisher Center with fare that is “distinctively downtown-on-the-Hudson.”“Lots of theaters outside of New York City can develop work,” she said, “but Bard is one of the few who chooses to dig into experimentation of form and bold artistic dares.”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesErik Tanner for The New York TimesLester, 50, grew up in London, in the period when the director Sam Mendes and the theater company Complicité were emerging. (He also admits to memorizing all the lyrics of “The Phantom of the Opera.”)But his own brief directorial career had a shaky start. At Oxford, he and another student persuaded the playwright Peter Shaffer to let them mount a production of Shaffer’s “Yonadab,” which hadn’t been performed since its disastrously reviewed 1985 premiere at the National Theater.About 15 minutes into the Oxford opening, there was a general power cut, and the play stopped. But the assembled London critics reviewed it anyway, noting, Lester recalled, that the play “hadn’t improved much.”“I was completely freaked out and thought, ‘This is too much pressure, I don’t think I can direct,’” he said.Instead, he enrolled in the dramaturgy program at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., even if — like many in theater — he was a bit hazy on what exactly dramaturgy was.A rendering of a planned new studio building designed by Maya Lin.Maya Lin Studio with Bialosky + Partners“Basically, I just learned what dramaturgy was by sitting in the room with directors,” he said, by “making mistakes and giving notes and being told to shut up.”Lester became the theater’s resident dramaturg under Robert Brustein and later, under Robert Woodruff, its associate artistic director. Asked about highlights, he mentioned working with artists like the Dutch-Syrian director Ola Mafaalani (“Wings of Desire”) and the Polish director Krystian Lupa, whom he approached after seeing his 11-hour production of “Sleepwalkers” at the Edinburgh Festival.Lupa’s “Three Sisters” at the A.R.T. was “amazing,” if not “particularly liked,” Lester recalled with a wry laugh. “But I got to be in rehearsal with him and see how he worked.”At Bard, Lester has shepherded an impressive series of audience pleasers. But when talking about him — and Caleb Hammons, the director of artistic planning and producing — collaborators use words like “artist centered” and “artist forward.”“They’re unusually good at being adaptive to what different artists need,” said Daniel Fish, whose “Most Happy in Concert” also originated at Bard.Tanowitz, the choreographer, first met Lester in 2015, when he invited her to do a repertory show. Afterward, over breakfast, he asked about the title of one dance, which included a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”Damon Daunno and Amber Gray in Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!” in 2015. The production went to Broadway, where it won a Tony Award for best revival.Cory WeaverDancers in the 2018 premiere of Pam Tanowitz’s “Four Quartets,” which grew out of a conversation Tanowitz and Lester had over breakfast.Maria BaranovaThey talked about the poem for a while, and then she went to the bathroom. When she got back, he asked, “Why don’t you make a dance of ‘Four Quartets’?”“That’s classic Gideon,” Tanowitz said. “He thinks big. He has chutzpah. Part of it was a dare, so I said yes, thinking in my mind, ‘This will never happen.’”He introduced her to collaborators including the actor Kathleen Chalfant, who narrated the piece; the painter Brice Marden, whose paintings inspired the scenic design; and the composer Kaija Saariaho. (The Fisher Center has also taken over the administration of Tanowitz’s company.)But for all Lester’s skills as a connector, Tanowitz said, mostly he “dares you to be yourself.”El Khoury, who is Lebanese, first met Lester in 2017, at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival, where he invited her to breakfast. “In classic Gideon fashion, he proposed all these things,” she recalled.She wasn’t sure how seriously to take any of them. But then he popped up again a few months later, at the CounterCurrent Festival in Houston.She came to Bard in 2019, as guest curator of the third Fisher Center biennial. During a long drive to New Hampshire, she and Lester had a rambling conversation that led to the creation a year later of the Center for Human Rights and the Arts, which is part of the Open Society University Network.“It’s a huge responsibility to bring in an artist from a totally different environment and give her a lot of space and funding and trust,” El Khoury said.The most recent biennial addressed the politics of land and food. It culminated in May with a four-day festival that included El Khoury’s “Memory of Birds,” an interactive sound installation that invited visitors to lie in cocoon-like structures at the base of a row of maple trees.“I love it that the last piece we commissioned was Tania’s, which could be experienced by seven people at a time,” Lester said. “And now we’re doing ‘Illinois’ for almost 900.”The Fisher Center, nestled in a college known for the humanities, is expanding at a time when many performing arts institutions are struggling.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesPeck, the resident choreographer at New York City Ballet, said he had been thinking for almost a decade about creating something based on Stevens’s album, which he fell in love with as a teenager.“It’s a real full-circle moment, getting to engage with this album of a generation,” he said.“Illinois,” which came to the Fisher Center with commercial producers attached, is the most expensive non-opera production it has done, with a budget of about $1.2 million. (“Oklahoma!,” Lester said, cost about $450,000.)The show, whose narrative was developed by Peck and the playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury (“Fairview”), has no dialogue, just the lyrics of the songs, which are orchestrated by Timo Andres and performed and sung by a 13-piece band.The 12 dancers include some who Peck worked with on the 2018 Broadway revival of “Carousel” and Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.”“I wanted to create a vehicle for today’s generation of dance artists who are working in theater and storytelling,” he said, “to tell a story using their language, which is their movement.”Critics were not invited — they will be at the show’s Chicago run — but at the final evening performance, the audience whooped and applauded after most songs. After the tap-inflected “Jacksonville,” featuring a rapturously received turn by Jennifer Florentino, Lester and Drury fist-bumped.The show, Lester said, is “full of joy.” And part of that feeling, for him, is the white-knuckle uncertainty that comes with every project.“The joy of it,” he said, “is not knowing whether something’s going to work.” More

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      in Movies

      The Many Lives of Martine Syms

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      LOS ANGELES — As self-portraits go, the video “DED” by Martine Syms is a bit masochistic. The artist’s digital avatar strolls across a flat, featureless limbo, enduring several gruesome deaths. Seppuku with a chef’s knife. Crippling, fatal allergies. Diarrhea so explosive she rockets into the sky like a rag doll, then dies from the fall. Then, somehow, she gets up and keeps walking.Syms remembers sending an early clip of the 15-minute piece to a friend. “I still think it’s kind of funny,” she said recently, at a booth at Little Dom’s, a red-sauce, dark wood Italian restaurant in this city’s Los Feliz neighborhood. “But let me be clear that I understand how people do not. They were like, ‘What the [expletive] is this? It’s really violent. I don’t like seeing you dying.’”But that’s the thing, she told me. “There’s always a level of seriousness read into a lot of things that I’m doing that I don’t necessarily connect with.”Especially when race is involved. “I’m using a signifier, Blackness, which for some people can connote serious pain,” she acknowledged. “But I see it as a real space of joy and freedom.”Syms, 34, is the sort of “new media” artist who antiquates the term. Since her days as a film programmer at clubs like the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, she has turned the various lenses of media around to interrogate what society expects of Black women, and Black artists in particular. An early video, “My Only Idol Is Reality,” from 2007, consists of a degraded VHS copy of a heated, unedited dialogue on race between two contestants on “The Real World.” Syms studied cinema at the Art Institute of Chicago, co-founded a book store called Golden Age and started an artist-book imprint called Dominica. She racked up tags: artist, writer, musician, publisher, teacher, filmmaker; D.J., influencer, brand. Throughout her art, her moving images feature avatars of herself that she endows with a vital mixture of ego and exhaustion, cupidity and love.“DED” (2021), a digital video on view in “Martine Syms: Grio College” at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art. Syms endows avatars of herself, including Teeny, seen above, with a vital mixture of ego and exhaustion, cupidity and love.Olympia Shannon/CCS BardIn the summer of 2017, Syms graduated with an M.F.A. from Bard College; that fall, she began a year as faculty at the California Institute of the Arts. In the interim, she produced a solo show at MoMA — a purple-tinged installation including photographs, furniture and a feature-length video.This fall brings her a triad of institutional coups, and a movie in theaters. Each stars dramatized, extrapolated versions of Syms. A new, open-ended video play fed by machine-learning algorithms anchors “Neural Swamp,” through Oct. 30, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And a gonzo sitcom called “She Mad,” 2015-2021, in which Syms often stars, appears at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago until February 2023. The most recent episode routes the artist’s real-life ups and downs through a cover of the “Life Story” TikToks posted by the rapper Lil Nas X.“DED” is the showpiece of “Grio College,” Syms’s retrospective at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, in upstate New York. Bard, the artist’s alma mater, also inspired her first foray into independent films: “The African Desperate,” which she directed and co-wrote with Rocket Caleshu, enters worldwide distribution with screenings in New York starting Sept. 16. (The artist Diamond Stingily, an old friend, plays the lead, a Black femme named Palace with a newly minted M.F.A.; Bridget Donahue, Syms’s New York dealer, and A.L. Steiner, her former teacher, have small roles as Palace’s professors.)Installation view of “Martine Syms: She Mad Season One,” a wry take on contemporary life as a Black woman, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, through Feb. 12, 2023.Nathan Keay/MCA ChicagoSyms’s many avatars are a record of survival in a cloying media atmosphere. They’re sometimes self-indulgent — necessarily so, in the manner of psychoanalysis or self-care. The notion of “Grio College,” a place that teaches the trick of honing personal experience into modern stories, developed through the artist’s experience on the M.F.A. track. Syms writes in the press notes to “The African Desperate” that the overlapping dystopias of an advanced art college in the bucolic Hudson Valley came laced with racism. One of the last sequences of the film layers found audio of a man telling off his bigoted co-workers with shots of postcard-perfect fields and shops in Troy, N.Y.“The curriculum that she presents is larger than what a college typically covers,” said Lauren Cornell, the chief curator at the Hessel. “It encompasses one’s whole life, friends, thinkers, culture.” Her professors and gallerists become collaborators; the places she lives become sets and settings.Sitting in the booth at Little Dom’s, on the edge of Hollywood, dayglo-orange braids fell across Syms’s lilac tank top and accented a tattoo on her shoulder: the word “EVIL.” (Seen from a certain angle, it almost reads “LIVE.”) Waitstaff in the hall zapped small flies with loud pops of an electric racquet.Syms grew up in Altadena, a quiet town abutting the mountains east of Los Angeles known as a retreat for roughneck millionaires and an enclave for the Black middle class. Her mother worked as a registered nurse at the Kaiser Permanente hospital on Sunset Boulevard, and Syms would take the bus into Los Angeles to spend afternoons browsing Goodwill and Skylight Books or watching films at the vintage theaters. The kinetic harshness of the city comes through in her work. Her characters take the bus; they walk in Los Angeles.Diamond Stingily, in the role of Palace, stars in “The African Desperate,” which Syms co-wrote and directed, and which opens in theaters this fall.Dominica, Inc.But virtual registers are just as important for Syms and her versions. In some of her videos, characters’ texts pop up on the screen in bubbles; her 2018 piece “Mythiccbeing” is an interactive chatbot. Throughout our conversation, she mustered text messages, voice memos and notes from her phone, piecing together how ideas coalesced into art. Her style of hyperlinking in real time matches the hybrid way she works, reifying, refining and recollecting the thoughts that make a person up.Syms traces “DED” to a dream she had in early 2020, while she was sick with Covid; it is stored in an audio file that she doesn’t remember recording. The title of the 2021 show in which that work debuted, “Loot Sweets,” derives from another reverie. She pulls up her notes app: “post ap life in a weird mall. bard people and others. lauren and i are trying to escape. people are looting so we stop by pleats please on the way out. everything is gone. all the good stuff at least. lauren drops from the second floor into the ocean while i crawl down to meet her. she swims w me bc she’s stronger against the current. we finally get out and i’m immediately shot dead.”It’s heavy stuff, a nightmare fed by civil unrest incited by police killing unarmed Black Americans, against the background simmer of a global pandemic. Syms explained the chain of associations behind the phrase “Loot Sweets”: medieval lute music, Bobby McFerrin’s cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” reparations. While artists and activists have called for ending the exploitation of images of Black death, Syms turned to gallows humor.Syms with her electric guitar in her studio in Los Angeles.Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York TimesBut Syms is mining the vein of absurdity, hidden in plain sight, running through freewheeling experiments in Black culture like Amiri Baraka’s poetry or Sun Ra’s jazz. In 2013, she wrote “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto,” which deflates Afrofuturist esoterica and other escapism. Instead, she proposes: “The chastening but hopefully enlivening effect of imagining a world without fantasy bolt-holes: no portals to the Egyptian kingdoms, no deep dives to Drexciya, no flying Africans to whisk us off to the Promised Land.”The curator Meg Onli, who included Syms in the 2019 exhibition “Colored People Time” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, told me that the text underpinned the show’s take on “the confluence of temporalities, Blackness and the mundane.”“I love her ability to pivot from conversations around Black futurity that center on the fantastic and spectacular,” Onli added, “and remind us that our future may not look drastically different from our present.”Syms pointed out that Teeny, her avatar in “DED,” doesn’t really die. The back of Teeny’s white sweatshirt reads TO HELL WITH MY SUFFERING in all caps. Call it a koan to contain the ambivalence of enjoying an often-awful world.Installation view of “Martine Syms: Neural Swamp,” through Oct. 30 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with a script and performances constantly revised in real time.Joseph Hu/Philadelphia Museum of ArtAt the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the glowing green installation of “Neural Swamp” mounts two women’s faces on monitors, arranged around vinyl poufs. A third screen flashes with footage from rounds of vintage video game golf. The score and performances are constantly revised in real time: Digitized actors recite a script that Syms wrote but an algorithm updates constantly into an amalgamation of sitcom clichés and tongues.Formally, “Neural Swamp” resembles the Chicago install, and both recall another Syms production: her design for a Prada-sponsored supper club in Hollywood during this year’s Frieze Los Angeles art fair. Her vision for what she called “Prada Mode,” branded “HelLA World,” included “every last detail, from the lecture series to the matchbooks,” Donahue said. Her name on the restaurant’s marquee, DMs from guests crawling around long screens in the dining room, closed-circuit videos of the crowd on monitors hung from the bare studs between the restaurant, the outside bar — “It was a Martine Syms waking dream scene.”Maybe it’s a metaphor, too: There are stanchions, there are walls, but sometimes you can walk through them. Maybe it’s simply that, in a world prone to displays of despair, Syms’s fluorescent way of coping draws a crowd.I asked Syms why, given her dynamic range, she still works as a gallery artist. “I feel a great deal of freedom, you know?” Only in the art world, she said, are your most unqualified hunches met with such serious support. She told me about an event at the Zentrum Paul Klee residency in Bern, Switzerland, where, in lieu of showing slides of old work, she asked the organizers to serve a purple cocktail at the bar. Not only did they agree, a mixologist spent hours beforehand helping her perfect the drink’s taste and color.“If I told somebody I want to run Little Dom’s for a month as an art project,” said Syms, “I probably could.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Beba’ Review: Learning From Ancestors

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      An Afro-Latina filmmaker explores her identity and generational trauma growing up in New York City and attending a predominantly white college.What’s most striking about the autobiographical documentary “Beba,” aside from the intimate lens and stunning cinematography, are its moments of vulnerability, which plunge the viewer into the Afro-Latina filmmaker’s familial and personal traumas, including heated arguments with her mother and her white friends.The film, written, directed and produced by Rebeca Huntt, traces her family’s migration to New York City, through her years at Bard College upstate, and then her move back to her parents’ place on Central Park West.“Beba,” which refers to Huntt’s childhood nickname, is not a glossed-over immigrant redemption story. Through poetry, narration — featuring the voices of writers like James Baldwin and Audre Lorde — and interviews with family and friends, Huntt, the daughter of a Black Dominican father and a Venezuelan mother, pieces together painful parts of her family and social history, extracting her own identity out of the remnants of her trauma. “Every one of us inherits the curses of our ancestors,” Huntt states. A focus is on her adversarial relationship with her mother and the tension that unfolds between them on and off camera. Huntt also interrogates her relationships to white friends amid rising racial and political tensions.Underexplored are the dynamics with and between the men in the family. Huntt’s father, who seems to be an idealized figure, is interviewed, but shies away from difficult questions. One gets the sense that he is let off the hook, perhaps because Huntt’s relationship with her mother takes up so much space. Though Huntt’s brother is a large part of the narrated story, the two are estranged, and his absence in the film is palpable. Still, “Beba” is profound. The filmmaker delves into all of who she is, including darker or more destructive aspects of her identity, pushing viewers to see Huntt’s complexity — and perhaps their own.BebaRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Music

      Review: To a Rare King Arthur Opera, Bard Says ‘Welcome Back’

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      Superb singers and a clear production make a strong case for Ernest Chausson’s seldom heard “Le Roi Arthus.”ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — It took just two words over the loudspeakers for the audience at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College on Sunday evening to break into vigorous applause: “Welcome back.”Welcome back, indeed, to Ernest Chausson’s seldom heard opera “Le Roi Arthus,” being presented as part of Bard’s SummerScape festival. And welcome back to many in the audience, for whom being in a theater for live opera with a full orchestra and chorus, after such a long deprivation, was truly something to cheer.“Le Roi Arthus,” based on the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, proved a powerful work for this fraught, polarized moment in American life. It is the story of an idealistic ruler who fails to bring about the era of enlightenment he strives for, but whose principles will endure, as an angelic chorus assures him at the end of an often ravishing score. The production is the latest project in the conductor Leon Botstein’s long campaign to break classical music from its fixation on repertory staples and call attention to neglected works.This remarkable opera, first performed in Brussels in 1903, four years after its composer’s death in a cycling accident at 44, is especially deserving. Chausson, who also wrote the libretto, labored on it for almost a decade — not because he was stuck, but because he wanted to get it right. He did. The Bard production, directed by Louisa Proske, is scenically spare but richly costumed and dramatically effective. And Botstein, leading the American Symphony Orchestra, an impressive cast and the excellent Bard Festival Chorale, made a compelling case for the piece. (How has it languished when many lesser scores by French composers of Chausson’s era — especially, for me, Massenet — keep returning to international stages?)The Bard production, directed by Louisa Proske, is scenically spare but richly costumed and dramatically effective.Maria BaranovaThe influence of Wagner, especially “Tristan und Isolde,” looms over “Le Roi Arthus.” Chausson was a Wagner devotee, no question: For his honeymoon in 1883, he took his wife to the Bayreuth Festival to see “Parsifal.” As he worked on “Arthus,” Chausson exchanged letters with his friend Debussy, who had a love-hate relationship with Wagner. In one letter Chausson wrote that the similarity of subject matter between his opera and “Tristan” — both concerning overpowering feelings of love that lead to betrayals of marriage and duty — would not matter to him if he “could only successfully de-Wagnerize myself.”Wagnerian strands run through the music, even hints of motifs from “Tristan” and the so-called “Tristan” chord. Yet the score also comes across as beholden to the French heritage Chausson was born into, especially Franck and Massenet. His use of thick chromatic harmonies is less dark and elusive, more ludic and radiant, than Wagner’s writing. The score is rich with lyrical stretches that almost break into song.The orchestral prelude teems, at first, with swashbuckling music that suggests the triumphant battle the king’s forces have just waged over the invading Saxons. We meet Arthur, with his wife, Guinevere, at his side, presiding over a celebratory gathering of his court. The baritone Norman Garrett, in elegant robes and gold crown, looked and sounded splendid as Arthur. His voice, deep-set but capable of lightness in its high range, easily conveyed authority and dignity. Yet even in his opening monologue he plumbed the music for hints of the king’s vulnerability.The opera’s illicit lovers, Lancelot (Matthew White) and Guinevere (Sasha Cooke), are reminiscent of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.Maria BaranovaWhen the king singles out the valiant knight Lancelot (the ardent tenor Matthew White) as a “true victor,” the other knights mutter their resentments, especially the menacing Mordred (Justin Austin, a youthful baritone). In this telling of the story, Lancelot and Guinevere are already deeply consumed by illicit love. As the queen, the mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke brings gleaming sound and a touch of self-destructive volatility to her singing. Unlike Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, this couple is fully aware that they are betraying their king and their oaths. But, as Guinevere sings, “love is the only law.”The singers brought dedication to an important project, learning these demanding roles for this production. Botstein’s enthusiasm for a score he has long championed came through — sometimes too much. In bringing out the brassy richness and intensity of the music, he sometimes let the orchestra overpower the singers. Still, he brought urgent pacing and color to this nearly three-hour score.The opera ends with a series of death scenes, one for each of the principal characters — a dramatically risky move that Chausson handles deftly. In a daringly slow, mesmerizing monologue, Guinevere strangles herself with her own long hair. Lancelot, having offered no defense in a battle with former comrades who are avenging their king, comes back to the castle mortally wounded, living long enough to ask Arthur’s forgiveness in anguished yet noble phrasesThe shaken Arthur, seeking death, is greeted by a group of heavenly maidens who offer to take him away — not to death, but to eternal sleep. Chausson turned this sequence into a shimmering, harmonically lush double chorus, performed here by choristers in celestial white robes. “Your name may perish,” they tell Arthur, but “your ideas are immortal.”Let’s hope this production helps Chausson’s opera thrive as well.Le Roi ArthusThrough Sunday at Bard College; fishercenter.bard.edu. Also streamed at that website on July 28. More